Attracting Beneficial Insects to Your Vegetable Garden

August is an interesting and busy time in a vegetable garden, as many readers will no doubt be well aware. Most of your attention is likely to be on harvesting and tending the summer crops.

Winter season doesn’t mean you have to turn your back to your flower garden until spring comes. There is a good number of plants that bloom beautifully even in the coldest of weather. Let’s dig into their world and see which ones you will fancy.

Regardless of whether you are just starting your gardening journey or are already a gardening pro, the question of how to stop detrimental pests from destroying your hard work will inevitably arise.

Birds make a great addition to your garden, they’re great to look at and they’re useful as well. For instance, they will eat slugs, snails, aphids, insects and other well-known troublemakers.

Lovely climbing rose on the front of this house

Attracting wildlife into your garden can help deal with types of pests and increase the diversity of life in the garden. Some methods for increasing wildlife are quite easy.

To coin a phrase ‘Sustainable Gardening is for Life not just a passing fancy’. It is easy to drop sustainable gardening when it gets tough but here are a few tips to help you stay the distance.

When God became the first gardener after creating the earth and heavens he noted that ‘no shrub of the field had yet grown on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, he had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.’

The two best complimentary colours are Red and Green.  There are many ways this is demonstrated in the spring garden and they will be sure to draw compliments. The Peonies are just opening under a bit of shelter and shade.

We are well and truly into festival season, but for some of us the allure of live music and days of partying is cancelled out by the huge crowds, shared facilities and mandatory camping. So why not bring that festival back home and create a wonderland in your garden for entertaining friends and relaxing, far away from the madding crowd?

Butterflies have this unexplainable allure that seems to appeal to people of all ages. The key to enticing these winged beauties to your yard, is utilizing adult nectar sources and larval (caterpillar) host plants in your plant palette.

Monitor cool-season crops for pests, such as aphids and various caterpillar species (cabbage loopers, cross-striped cabbageworm, and diamondback moth caterpillars). Properly identifying these pests will help in selecting control methods. For aphids, there are many natural predatory insects, such as lady beetle larvae, lacewings, syrphid flies, damsel bugs, and wasps. For more information on predatory insects, see HGIC 2820, Natural Enemies: Predators and Parasitoids. If additional control is needed for aphids, a commercially prepared insecticidal soap may be used. For more detailed information on insecticidal soap, see HGIC 2771, Insecticidal Soaps for Garden Pest Control. A naturally occurring bacterium, B.t. (Bacillus thuringiensis), may be used to control young caterpillars. As with all pesticides, read the label and apply at recommended rates and frequencies. Regardless of what pest you have, it is a good idea to maintain good sanitation in the garden. Always remember to remove any leftover plant debris at the end of the season. This will help reduce many over-wintering pest problems.