The Garden Lady

This post is the second in a series of posts on the control of pests.

The second question a gardener has to ask when seeing pests or pest damage in the garden is: “Are the pests still actively damaging the plants or have they long since left or matured?”

Many pests have a brief lifespan. They do their damage and in a few weeks of damage their eating-part of their life cycle is finished. In that brief period when they are eating the plants they may do what seems like a lot of damage because they eat a large number of plants including flowers and herbs. Their damage is ugly. Then when the move on to another phase of their life cycle, they might not need to feed on the plant leaves or stems.

This spring the the four-lined plant bug did a job on my mint and my Russian sage. Almost all the leaves were eaten and affected. But I knew that when it was time for the flowers to emerge, they would not be eating and the flowers would look fine. My flowers and plants recovered. But I am not a farmer, so I can be tolerant. And in my garden the plants they ate were mostly weeds, so I did not have to be concerned.

Get to know the insects in your garden. By knowing about the the four-lined plant bug, I knew that in my garden I did not have to do anything drastic like use any strong pesticides (see here).

If you want to ID the insect and learn about it but cannot find the information online, take the insect in a closed jar to your local Master Gardener office or agriculture extension office. Do NOT squish the insect. To kill it put the closed jar into your freezer overnight.

One of the challenges of gardening is how to control the pests that like your garden as much if not more than you, the gardener. Some of these pests’ lives depend on your garden for their livelihood- literally eating to remain alive to repeat their own life cycle. So when you have insects on your plants you have to decide “How important is the damage to the overall appearance of the flower in my garden?”

Some insects that eat plants in the garden are good and helpful insects. We all know that bees are beneficial insects. Yes, they might sting us, but basically they are helping to pollinate the flowers or to get nectar to make honey. Without bees we wouldn’t have most plants. So we allow the bees to remain in our garden and don’t use insecticides to kill them.

But there are other equally good or beneficial insects that come to our plants that even do damage to the plants. But because we like these insects, we don’t want to kill them. For example, everyone seems to love butterflies and no one wants to kill them or eliminate butterflies from their gardens. But before they become the butterfly that we love, they were caterpillars that had to eat plants so that they could become (metamorphosis) that beautiful insect fluttering in our garden. Caterpillars need some of the plants that we grow and can become a pest especially if you are a farmer whose livelihood depends on your crops. For example, among the plants butterfly caterpillars need, depending on the type of butterfly, are parsley, or dill or fennel or even carrots or black-eyed-Susans.

Most of us are gardeners who do not rely on our crops for a living, so do we really care if caterpillars eat these plants in our gardens? To rephrase my original question: How much damage is being done by the insects in your garden and are you willing to live with that damage?