Keep Your Garden Clean from Pests
As human sickness may often be stopped by healthy conditions, so pests could be kept away by strict garden cleanliness. Tons of waste are lodging places for the breeding of insects. I don’t think a compost pile will do the harm, but rough, uncared-for spots seem to invite trouble.
If we could garden without any interference from the pests which attack plants, then indeed gardening would be astraightforward matter. But all the time we must keep an eye out for these tiny foes tiny in size, but tremendous in the havoc they make.
There are certain helps to keeping pests down. The continual stirring up of the soil by earthworms is ahelp in keeping the soil open to air and water. Plenty of our common birds feed on insects. The sparrows, robins, chickadees, meadow larks and orioles are all examples of birds who help in this manner. Some insects feed on other and dangerous insects. Some kinds of ladybirds do this good deed. The ichneumon-fly helps too. And toads are wonders in the quantity of insects they can consume at one meal. The toad deserves very kind treatment from each one of us.
Each gardener should try to make her or his garden into a place attractive to birds and toads. A good birdhouse, grain splattered about in early spring, a water-place, are invites for birds to stay a bit 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. Some stones of some size underneath the shade of a plant 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 gnaws at the plant actually taking pieces of it into its system. This kind of insect has a mouth fitted to do this work. Grasshoppers and caterpillars are of this sort. The other kind sucks the juices from a plant. This, in a lot of ways, is the worst sort. Plant lice belong here, as do mosquitoes, which prey on us. All 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 could 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 single 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 deadly work of attacking, in 1 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 am I able to tell what insect is doing the harmful work?’ Well, you can tell partly by the work done, and partly by seeing the insect itself. This latter thing isnot always 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 fairly certain the cutworm is abroad. What does he look like? Well, that’s a hard question because his family is a large one.
Should you see sometime a grayish striped caterpillar, you may know itis a cutworm. But due to its practice of resting in the ground in the day and working by night, it is difficult to catch sight of one. The cutworm is around early in the season ready to chop the flower stalks of the hyacinths. When the peas come on a bit later, he’s ready for them. A particularly good way to block 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 more common. Those we see are often green in color. But they could be red, yellow or brown. Lice are easy enough to find since theyare always adhering to their host. As sucking insects they have to adhere 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 harder to address.
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 a vegetable. They lay heaps 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 surface 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 supposed to be. How are you to grasp where they are? They’re quite certain to hide close to the plants they’re feeding on. So water the ground with some nice clean lime water. This can annoy them, and up they’ll poke to see what the matter is.
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