This guest post on farmscaping was written by Michelle Rebecca.

PEST CONTROL IS a constant problem for any vegetable gardener, but especially for those of us making a commitment to organic gardening. Commercial pesticides are dangerous to health and pollute the environment. So-called “organic” pesticides often aren’t very safe either, and even the safest pesticides can kill across the board, slaughtering beneficial insects as well as pests.

The more natural approach is to fight bugs with bugs, using predators and parasites to control unwanted bug populations while encouraging pollinators to visit your garden. Attracting beneficial bugs requires a little planning, and a willingness to sacrifice a small portion of your vegetable garden to insect-attracting plants.

Farmscaping

Farmscaping combines food crops with flowering plants to attract pollinating insects. The more pollinators you have buzzing around your vegetable garden, the higher your vegetable yield because more flowers are pollinated.

As a rule, set aside 5-10 percent of your vegetable garden for flowering plants. Choose your flowering plants carefully; you want enough variety for a full season’s worth of blooms.

In addition to attracting pollinators, farmscaping adds some visual appeal to your vegetable garden. You spend plenty of time tending your garden – you might as well do so in attractive surroundings.

Farmscaping provides habitat for beneficial insects.

Predatory bugs

A number of predatory bugs feast on the insect pests looking to dine on your vegetable crop. Ladybugs are the most common example, but don’t neglect other critters. Lacewing larvae, for instance, are such voracious aphid eaters they’ve earned the nickname aphid wolves.

Predatory bugs need a food source, places to shelter, and access to water. The pests you’re trying to control provide the food source, so no worries there. Places to shelter include tree crevices and leaf litter (ladybugs overwinter in such locations).

Ground beetles eat a wide range of soft-bodied pests, including caterpillars, slugs and garden snails. Beetles prefer undisturbed areas so they don’t have to travel far to find food and shelter. Providing some mulch under surrounding trees or shrubs attracts them to your garden.

Regular plant watering should provide your insect allies with enough water, or you could add a water feature to your garden. Standing water, however, attracts its own pests, so you might want to consider combining a water feature with yard mosquito control.

Staked beans and other climbing plants make good anchors for spider webs.

Spiders

It shouldn’t need saying, but spiders are a welcome sight in a vegetable garden. These aggressive little hunters have hunted plant-harming insects for millions of years. Staked beans and other climbing plants make good anchors for spider webs.

Release or Attract?

Some people deliberately release beneficial insects into their gardens, buying boxes of ladybugs and other beneficial bugs from commercial outlets.

Releasing bugs can help control pests, but only if your garden is already attractive to bug-life. Unless conditions are ideal, your released bugs will either die or migrate to more attractive locations.

Michelle Rebecca is an aspiring writer with a passion for blogging. She enjoys writing about a vast variety of topics and loves that blogging gives her the opportunity to publicly voice her thoughts and share advice with an unlimited audience.

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1. Wildflowers for Beneficial Insects
2. Do You Really Need to Buy Beneficial Insects
3. Learning from Polyface Farm

I’VE MENTIONED BEFORE THAT I LET NATIVE WILDFLOWERS grow to encourage beneficial insects to visit my garden. There’s a sloped section of my yard that sits in between my two groups of raised beds that I use for wildflowers. The soil there is mostly construction dirt and the incline encourages erosion, so growing grass in this area is nearly impossible.

Still, the weeds and wildflowers don’t seem to mind the bad growing conditions. Each year the soil gets a little better and we get an increasingly wide variety of wildflowers that attract all kinds of pollinators and insect predators. I don’t know if it’s as a result of the wildflowers, but pollination in the garden is almost never a problem. Plus, it’s fascinating to relax for a second and watch all the insects go about their soap opera lives. One bug is always chasing another bug away, etc. The variety of both good and potentially bad bugs in and around this wild area is dizzying.

Where I live in Southern New Hampshire, the beginning of summer features a list of four wildflowers that have blooms that are especially attractive to beneficial insects: Yarrow, Daisy Fleabane, Milkweed and Black-Eyed Susan. These are all in full bloom right now and the bugs are frantic to get as much nectar from them as possible.

A hoverfly drinks from the wildflower Yarrow.

1. Yarrow

In the wildflower world, Yarrow has a lot going for it. Its flowers are an important source of nectar for beneficial insects, and the plant itself can be used as an anti-inflammatory, antiseptic and astringent. But that’s not what caught my eye. What I found most surprising is that Yarrow is reputed to stimulate plant growth when used as a companion plant. Since it’s drought tolerant, maybe it would make a great cover crop? I don’t know. But the main reason I like it is because it attracts parasitic wasps and hover flies in droves to my garden. Although the flowers are tiny, it seems to allow insects of all sizes to feed from its blossoms

2. Daisy Fleabane

This wildflower loves poor soil and construction dirt, which I have a lot of in my yard. It’s an annual that, left to its own devices, will self seed very close to the parent plant, making it seem like a perennial. Small bees, flies and, on occasion, small parasitic wasps will come to feed on its nectar. The name fleabane suggests that the plant deters fleas, but this is a myth. Fleabane is more of an insect attractant than a repellent.

Chalcid wasp on Daisy Fleabane

Native bees love milkweed flowers.

3. Milkweed

Of the four wildflowers, my neighbors may like this one the least. I can just hear them say: “Why would you let that grow on your property? It even has weed in its name!” Still native bees and other nectar-loving insects seem to flock to Milkweed and are often frantic to gather nectar from its clumps of flowers. The variety in my yard (common milkweed) has pink flowers and loves to grow in pine bark mulch. It spreads along runner roots more than from its feathery seeds. Of course, Milkweed is maybe most famous for the fact that it is the only food that that Monarch butterfly caterpillars will eat (Sounds like my kids). That said, I’ve seen no dramatic increase in Monarchs since the Milkweed took hold.

4. Black-Eyed Susan

Parasitic wasp on Black-Eyed Susan

It costs me next to nothing to let this patch grow every year. I mow it much less often and only occasionally cut out woody shrubs and small trees. It’s well worth it to be able to take a break while gardening and watch all kinds of insects perform aerial dynamics as they frantically try to collect the nectar before the blossoms close. Plus, there’s the added benefit of pest reduction as more insect predators are encouraged to visit my garden.

Related articles you might enjoy:

1. Learning from Polyface Farm
2. Selective Sloppiness
3. Seven Eco-Friendly Ideas for the Garden

I’M OBSESSIVE ABOUT ORGANIC FOODS, and I don’t use pesticides or herbicides in my home or garden. I try not to impress this viewpoint on others. The only exception is my wife. On most days she’s onboard with my buy organic viewpoint. But once in a while, she does complain that it’s hard to buy food for me.

But it pains me to admit that there’s one exception to my “don’t use pesticides rule.” I have a spray can of wasp poison in the basement. I hate to use it. The same can has been in the basement for probably seven or eight years, so you know I don’t use it very often. When I do, it’s on a very limited basis.

So you understand, I don’t have anything against wasps, hornets, yellow jackets, etc. and I don’t ever recall being stung by one. In fact, I attract thousands with native plants in an area near my garden. They are great predators and my garden can use all the predators it can get. So why do I keep the spray can around?

Once at a neighborhood block party

When my son was eight we went to our neighborhood block party. It was a late summer day and the kids were running around on the grass. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my son scooching down and crying. I thought he had twisted an ankle, but it turns out he had been stung by a wasp on his leg.

At first, we didn’t think much of it. He had been stung twice already that summer and the previous time his arm had swelled some. But this time we could see it was worse, so we brought him inside the neighbors house and gave him some Benadryl. Since it didn’t seem to have any effect, we gave him a second dose of Benadryl after about 30 minutes.

Two of my neighbors are nurses at the local hospital and another is a doctor. We were all watching him when his face started to swell. His lips got so big he looked almost like a duck with a bill. That’s when we decided to take him to the hospital, which was not far from our house.

Epinephrine, a wonder drug

When we got to the hospital the doctor gave him epinephrine (or something like it) and he made an instant recovery. But I don’t mind telling you that I was plenty scared. It could have easily been much worse. Swelling from an allergic reaction to a sting can stop your breathing. Now, during the summer and fall, an EpiPen is my son’s constant companion. I wish I had a penny for each time I’ve said “Do you have your EpiPen?”

So when I come across a hornet’s nest, I pull out the can from the basement. I really hate doing it, but sometimes life forces you to compromise your principles.

Over the years, my wife has come to believe it was a whiteface hornet that stung my son. Whiteface hornets, a type of wasp, normally make paper hives in trees. In my area, it seems the variety we have makes nests in holes in the ground, too. My son probably stepped on the entrance to the nest.

Yesterday I ran over a nest with the lawn mower. They weren’t particularly aggressive and didn’t come after me, but I could see from the number of hornets that came out to protect the nest that it was a very big nest. I had to take care of it before the fall when the wasps would become much more aggressive. It only took a second to spray inside the hole and cover it with a rock.

Over the years, I’ve learned that sometimes these nests have a backdoor. Usually, the second entrance is much smaller. Be careful.

Do you have a better solution for wasp nests. Let me know by commenting below.

Related articles you might enjoy:

1. Do You Really Need to Buy Beneficial Insects?
2. Seven Eco-friendly Ideas for the Garden
3. Learning from Polyface Farm

IN HER BOOK THE RESILIENT GARDENER, Carol Deppe introduces the novel concept of “selective sloppiness.” It’s an idea that is completely foreign to me. My attitude has always been anything that is worth doing, is worth doing neatly. On the other hand, Deppe believes that many things in the garden are worth doing, but “only some things are worth doing well.”

Deppe provides several examples where selective sloppiness applies, but the one that I appreciate most concerns smoothing the soil after you turn it to plow under the weeds. She used to go to great pains to smooth out the soil and make it look nice until she realized that a surface with dips and crevices holds water more efficiently, reducing the amount of watering needed. Now she uses a peasant hoe to only slightly smooth the planting surface.

Selective sloppiness in my garden

Unknowingly, I also subscribe to the philosophy of selective sloppiness. I have a hill on the south side of my property that is pretty steep. It’s difficult to mow and hard to keep grass there because the water runs down the hill and causes soil erosion. After trying mulch and a number of other ground covers, I decided to just let the weeds grow. I added some wildflower seeds for good measure.

I wrote about this strip of wildflowers and weeds in my article called Do You Really Need to Buy Beneficial Insects? I must admit that the hill looks weedy and unkept. If my neighbors could see it, they probably would be saying what’s up with that?

But the tall weeds on the hill have been an unexpected source of wonder and amazement. My wife and I are always marveling at the unusual blossoms and plants that spring up on the hill. Some are obviously from the wildflower seeds that we scattered around. Other strange and attractive plants appear there as if by magic, doing what weeds will do. Many attract large numbers of native pollinators.

The beneficial insects love this wild area and we see all kinds of insect predators that we have never seen before. It’s also stopped the erosion in all but a few places because the roots can more firmly hold the poor quality soil that was getting washed away.

More than just in the garden

I think it’s possible that Deppe’s selective sloppiness philosophy may have applications beyond the garden. It wouldn’t be the first time that people have learned valuable life lesson from their experience in the garden.

After all, it’s been popular lately for men to sport three-day beard growth. Isn’t that a form of selective sloppiness? And what about furniture and blue jeans that have been artificially worn so that they look old? Isn’t that selective sloppiness?

Do you exercise selective sloppiness in or out of the garden? Let us know by commenting below.

Related articles you might enjoy:

1. Do You Really Need to Buy Beneficial Insects?
2. Learning from Polyface Farm
3. Seven Eco-friendly Ideas for the Garden

LAST JULY, FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, I found a tomato hornworm impregnated by a parasitic wasp in my garden. I found it on my brandywine tomato plant and left it there so the braconid wasps could develop.

It was no coincidence that I found it when I did. Early last year, I decided to let the south side hill by the garden go un-mowed. The dirt on the hill was eroding and I thought it would be best to let the weeds grow to better hold the soil. I also planted wildflowers to attract beneficial insects and make it look attractive. The plan was to cut it back in the late fall to avoid having trees grow so near to the house.

To my surprise, it attracted far more beneficial bugs than I expected, including the wasp that found the hornworm. But it wasn’t because I purchased and seeded wildflowers. It was because the native wildflowers flourished. Queen Anne’s lace, milkweed, yarrow, daisy fleabane, goldenrod, New England aster and others all did reasonably well in the poor soil on the hill.

Ladybugs, tachinid flies, lacewings and parasitic wasps

It was the native plants that attracted a very wide variety of pollinators – many bee types I didn’t know existed – as well as many predators including ladybugs, tachinid flies, lacewings,  and a variety of parasitic wasps.  

The hill became a hot bed of insect activity. There seemed to be thousands of predators, prey and pollinators even though there were few if any before the weeds sprung up. For me it was fascinating watching all the different insects go about their business. I was especially pleased when, for example, I saw a ladybug larva munching on some aphids or a lacewing flying away with a helpless bug.

Here’s a YouTube video that someone else produced that shows a hornworm with paracitic wasps about to emerge.

A good book to help you identify good and bad bugs in your garden is Rodale’s Insect, Disease & Weed I.D. Guide: Find-It-Fast Organic Solutions for Your Garden. If you buy it using this Amazon link, I make a small amount of money, which helps me continue to publish Suburban Hobby Farmer.

Adding beneficials not the answer

Before this year, I was leaning towards buying beneficial insects, e.g., blue mason bees, to help with pollinating my apple trees and ladybugs to help with controlling aphids. Now I’ve realized that adding beneficial insects to the garden is not the answer. Beneficials were not missing from my garden. What I truly needed was to restore the balance in the environment by making sure that the proper habitat was available. I didn’t even need to buy seeds. The weed seeds were already there.

The beneficials I would have bought probably wouldn’t have stuck around anyway. Then again, maybe I’m just lucky to live in an almost rural part of Southern New Hampshire where there’s still a variety of insects living close by.

Do you have any great wildflowers that attract beneficial insects to your garden? Let us know by commenting below.

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