Garden Wars
Getting good bugs to fight your garden pests
by
Lacey Spade
Smashwords Edition
Garden Wars:
Getting good bugs to fight your garden pests
Copyright 2011 by Lacey Spade
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Table of Contents
Chapter Two: What the heck is a good bug?
Chapter Three: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Chapter Four: The Spring Journal
Chapter Five: Creating a Beneficial Insectary Garden
Chapter Six: Private Live of the Good Bugs
When my husband and I moved into our house twenty years ago, it came with an abandoned barn and down-at-the-heels walnut orchard, bordered by a weedy, rock-infested railroad easement. Somehow it was perfect for us.
The first summer I planted a garden, I might as well have staked a ‘Pests Dine Here’ sign in the middle. Every day the pepper plants had more pin-size bullet holes, as though they were target practice for diminutive riflemen. Every day the tomatoes grew paler and sicker, covered with gluttonous creatures who would never thank me, I’m sure, for providing them with such nice food.
My garden was dead in a week. Okay, I thought. You wanna’ wage war on my plants, you evil bugs, you’re gonna be sorry.
Except that I knew better. I was already an organic gardener at heart. I’d been reading the books and articles and I really wanted to believe it was all true.
But facing the death of these tender young things made me wonder if I had the sturdiness of soul it would take to grow food and flowers without a chemical crutch.
I brooded over the plants as they gasped their last dying breath. Before long, weeds reclaimed the area, mocking my efforts. No one could have guessed it was supposed to be a garden. The bugs had won.
I was mad enough to try it again. This was war.
I was armed and dangerous and I had something the bugs didn’t have.
I had knowledge. I knew the bad bugs had enemies, lots of them. Every single one of these varmints had ten good bugs who would love to eat them for breakfast.
I felt a little cocky now, knowing this. It’s just like real life, I thought. The good guys always win. Oh, wait, that’s just in the movies.
But then I wondered where all these beneficial insects were? How was I going to invite them to dinner?
I never thought much about bugs until I started gardening. When I began playing in the dirt, my experience with good and bad bugs was pretty much limited to ladybeetles and spiders.