You Grow Girl: Gardening for the People

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

by Evelyn Wolf

Each year more gardeners are taking steps to reduce their dependency on chemicals to control garden pests. My on-going battle with slugs will no doubt continue as usual this summer since the chemical route for this destructive pest poses more of a threat to my children and our cat, Tiger than I'm willing to risk.

I have discovered a formidable ally to call to the battle front this year though — the lowly Ground Beetle.

I noticed a few ugly brown beetles scurrying under some paving stones last week and after some investigation, I learned that they were Ground Beetles that eat slugs and their eggs. Yahoo! No more lacework Hosta! All I had to do was spend a few dollars on more paver stones (where I learned they like to dwell), as a welcome mat and wait for my new found friends to invite their extended family to join them in a slug feast!

Signs of whatever pest plague is in store for us this year may be already evident in your garden, but before you panic and pull out the ammunition, be sure it's a bug that you want to be rid of. I could have just as easily deemed my ground beetles too ugly to be good for my plants and banished them with my boot, but thankfully, natural curiosity was stronger than my gardener's crush-all-potential-enemies instinct.

As with many things in life, beauty has little to do with the nature of the beast. The stunningly beautiful Swallowtail butterfly starts life as an equally striking caterpillar that will chew your parley family plants to their skeleton. On the flip side, the ugly and menacing Spined Soldier Bug is your garden ally in combating tent caterpillars and sawfly.

Reducing dependency on pesticides involves more than switching to natural products. Real organic gardening means working together with the natural cycles of a garden's life and learning to tolerate a little plant damage for the sake of keeping the whole garden chemical-free and in ecological balance. Put simply, you need a few bad bugs around for the good bugs to consider your patch of earth a happy hang-out.

When a pesticide is used, whether organic or synthetic, many good bugs are also killed, and those that do survive will need to head off to better feeding grounds. A garden is then virtually bug free and completely vulnerable to a new pest attack.

Inevitably, bad guys will target the garden as a predator-free zone where they can chow down, undisturbed, on the tender green of their choice. Eventually predator bugs, the good guys, will also come back since their preferred meal has returned, but by then it's probably already too late since the chemical gardener has already brought out the kill-all and the no-win cycle repeats itself.

An ideal garden has small numbers of all common bugs — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Garden pest populations need to be controlled, not eliminated.

Here are a few facts discovered in my Ground Beetle investigation worth considering when making the acquaintance of any new garden insect guest.

- Entomologists estimate that more than 90% of insects are beneficial. That means they are either predators of the insects gardeners consider pests, or otherwise contribute to garden health by eating debris, pollinating flowers, burrowing air holes or performing other generally helpful tasks. Of the remaining 10%, at least half are considered neutral and may nibble a leaf or two while playing their role in the garden food chain.

- In the natural world of predator/prey, camouflage is a common defense, so many bad guys look very similar to beneficial insects. The aforementioned good guy, the Spined Soldier Bug, looks very similar to the plant-sucking Brown Stink Bug. The Tachinid Fly, an important predator of many caterpillar and grub pests, has the misfortune of looking almost identical to the common pesky housefly. The beneficial Rove Beetle, which helps combat Cabbage Maggots and lawn grubs can easily be mistaken for an Earwig without antennae.

The key to all this of course is to accurately identify your good guys from your bad guys. Unfortunately, the good bugs don't wander into our gardens wearing nametags, so searching out good reference books is the first step. Look for a book that identifies all common insects, not just pests. Ask at your local library or good bookstore for either one of the following two books — "The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control" by Barbara Ellis, or "Insect, Disease and Weed I.D. Guide" by Linda Gilkeson.

Either one of these books will arm you with the only real "pesticide" that's effective for the long term — knowledge. Learning which are the good bugs, which are the bad, and which are merely ugly is the key to stopping the cycle of crisis management.

There is a fascinating miniature ecosystem to discover right in your own backyard! Aim at becoming more of an observer rather than a ruler and you'll reap all of the rewards a garden has to offer.

Evelyn Wolf is a freelance garden writer, local gardening expert, and owner of Garden Possabilities Bookstore.

You Grow Girl

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

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