As human illness may frequently be forestalled by healthful conditions, so pests might be kept away by stern garden cleanliness. Tons of waste are lodging places for the breeding of insects. I donot think a compost pile will do the harm, but unkempt, uncared-for spots seem to invite difficulty.
If we could garden without any interference from the pests which attack plants, then indeed gardening would be an easy matter. But all of the time we must watch out for these tiny foes tiny in size, but tremendous in the havoc they make.
There are certain helps to keeping pests down. The constant stirring up of the soil by earthworms is ahelp in keeping the soil open to air and water. Lots of our common birds feed on insects. The sparrows, robins, chickadees, meadow larks and orioles are all examples of birds who help in this way. Some insects eat other and dangerous insects. Some types of ladybirds do this good deed. The ichneumon-fly helps too. And toads are wonders in the amount of insects they can consume at one meal. The toad deserves extraordinarily kind treatment from each one of us.
Each gardener should try to make her or his garden into a place tasty to birds and toads. A good birdhouse, grain splattered about in early spring, a water-place, are invites for birds to stay a while in your garden. If you wish toads, fix things up for them too. During a hot summer day a toad likes to rest in the shade. By night he’s ready to go forth to eat but not to kill, since toads prefer live food.
How can one “fix up” for toads? Well, one thing to do is to prepare a retreat, quiet, dark and damp. A few stones of some size beneath the shade of ashrub with perhaps a carpeting of damp leaves, would appear awfully fine to a toad.
There are 2 general classes of insects known BTW they do their work. One kind nibbles at the plant truly taking pieces of it into its system. This type of insect has a mouth fitted to try this work. Grasshoppers and caterpillars are of this sort. The other kind sucks the juices from a plant. This, in many ways, is the worst sort. Plant lice belong here, as do mosquitoes, which prey on us. All of the scale insects fasten themselves on plants, and suck out the life of the plants.
Now are we able to fight these chaps? The chewing fellows might be caught with poison sprayed on plants, which they take into their bodies with the plant. The Bordeaux mixture which is a poison sprayed on plants for this purpose.
In the other case the only thing is to attack the insect direct. So certain insecticides, as they’re called, are sprayed on the plant to fall upon the insect. They do a threatening work of attacking, in one way or another, the body of the insect.
Sometimes we are much troubled with underground insects at work. You have seen a garden covered with ant hills. Hereis a remedy, but one of which you must be careful.
This question is constantly being asked, ‘How can I tell what insect is doing the harmful work?’ Well, you can tell partially by the work done, and partially by seeing the insect itself. This latter thing is not necessarily so easy to accomplish. I had cutworms one season and never saw one. I saw only the work done. If stalks of tender plants are cut clean off be pretty sure the cutworm is abroad. What does he look like? Well, that is a hard query because his folks is a huge one.
Should you see sometime a grayish striped caterpillar, you can know itis a cutworm. But due to its habit of resting in the ground during the day and working by night, it is hard to catch sight of one. The cutworm is around early in the season prepared to chop the flower stalks of the hyacinths. When the peas come on a bit later, heis prepared for them. A very good way to dam him off is to put paper collars, or tin ones, about the plants. These collars should be about an inch away from the plant.
Naturally, plant lice are way more common. Those we see are frequently green in color. But they might be red, yellow or brown. Lice are straightforward enough to find since they’re always clinging to their host. As sucking insects they need to cling close to a plant for food, and one is pretty sure to find them. But the biting insects do their work, and then go hide. That makes them much tougher to deal with.
Rose slugs do great damage to the rose bushes. They eat out the body of the leaves, so that just the veining is left. They’re soft-bodied, green above and yellow below.
A beetle, the striped beetle, attacks young melons and crush leaves. It eats the leaf by riddling out holes in it. This beetle, as its name implies, is striped. The back is black with yellow stripes running lengthwise.
Then there are the slugs, which are garden pests. The slug will devour nearly any garden plant, whether it’s a flower or aplant. They lay lots of eggs in old rubbish heaps. Do you see the good of cleaning up rubbish? The slugs do more harm in the garden than almost any other single insect pest. You can discover them in the following way. There’s a trick for bringing them to the outside of the ground in the day time. You see they rest during the day below ground. So just water the soil in which the slugs are meant to be. How are you to understand where they are? They’re quite likely to hide near the plants they’re feeding on. So water the ground with some nice clean lime water. This could bug them, and up they will poke to see what the matter is.
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