Frogs, Toads, Lizards and Birds the Alpha Predators in Your Garden

As humans, we like to think of ourselves as the alpha everything. If we are honest, though, when it comes to fighting insects of almost any type, if you take away our chemicals and we are a sorry lot. That is why one of the main focuses of this blog is chemical-free pest control for our healthy organic gardens.

In past articles, we have discussed using predatory insects, smoke and Diatomaceous Earth as a means of controlling those creepy crawlies that love to munch on our plants. Today, I would like to introduce you to the true alpha hunters of the garden world frogs, toads, lizards and birds.

Frogs and Toads as Pest Control Agents

Toads are fairly easy to attract to your garden while frogs can be problematic to an extent. Being semi-aquatic frogs rarely will stray too far from water. However, if you are lucky enough to have a small pond in your garden or have one nearby, you are in luck. They are magnificent insect hunters and depending on the types your garden attracts, their chirping, croaking and clicking create very soothing nighttime music.

Toads, on the other hand, are very easy to attract. As long as you have some moist, loose soil and provide them with a little shelter they will come and stay. The soil they prefer is what most of us want in our gardens anyway.

Loose soil, high in organic content, like compost, is their favorite. Toads like to dig down in the moist soil to avoid overheating and absorb moisture through their skin. They actually drink and breathe this way.

To provide shelter I use either football sized rocks propped up on smaller stones, or broken flower pots to create little caves they can shelter in and stay out of the sun. As most regular readers will have realized by now, I try to never waste anything and this is an excellent way to put those broken pots to good use.

Lizards in the Garden

Much like frogs and toads, lizards are uncanny hunters able to stalk insects and devour them in amazing numbers. They will eat virtually anything that will fit into their mouths, which makes them effective not just common insect pest but caterpillars as well. They come in a huge array of types and again as with the frogs, many are very vocal.

One key point with lizards is that they like cracks and crevices to use as cover. Adding a few small rock piles to your garden and leaving a few cracks in garden walls will help you attract and hold them.

Birds

I know birds can be problematic in a garden. Yes, they eat insect but they also eat seeds and fruits. Still, they can be a great help in the garden provided you properly provide for them and attract the right types.

Members of the wren and sparrow families are the best insect hunters, in my experience and I openly admit I have a soft spot for bluebirds in particular. Bird houses and baths are a great way to start attracting them to your garden and to help prevent them from causing damage of their own; a bird feeder should be kept well stocked to feed their need for seeds.

For me, one of the joys of organic gardening to observe and learn from nature. I guess I may have crossed the line between being a gardener and becoming a naturalist of sorts. I find nothing shameful or cruel about watching one animal survive by feeding on another. It is the way nature intended things to be.

As a bonus to all of this, I have found that by working with nature I have to exert a lot less effort and actually achieve greater results. By attracting predators to my garden I not only minimize the damage that insect pest cause to my veggies, I have the slightly sadistic joy of knowing that they eventually end up as fertilizer to help my plants grow. And the circle of life continues.

Composting for Beginners

Many people shy away from composting because they think it is some mysterious black art or takes specialized knowledge to do properly. In truth, composting is such a natural process that converting your waste into fertile soil is almost impossible to get wrong and takes absolutely no special skills or equipment. A compost tumbler can make the process more efficient, but it is by no means a necessity. I have one friend whose composting method is nothing more than using the old hay from his barn as mulch, on his garden paths and then sweeping it into his beds as it breaks down. He then puts down a fresh layer of hay and starts over.

At a most basic level composting is no more than doing what nature does with waste, but doing it in a more efficient manner. In nature, microorganisms break down waste and return the nutrients to the soil where they started out. It is kind of an “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” kind of process. Every leaf on every plant, every blade of grass and every piece of fruit started out as soil and was transformed by nature into something wonderful. When composting you are simply finishing the life cycle as nature intended and like most things that are natural it is dirt simple. Pun intended.

Direct Composting

What I term as direct composting is the method I use and recommend when trying recovering very poor soil and as a way to make use of things like meat trimmings and food scraps that I don’t want in my compost pile to draw vermin.

I keep a small can with a cover under the sink and collect the food scraps in it. When it is full or I just decide to I take it out to the garden, dig a small hole and bury the goods under six inches or more of soil. From there nature will take care of the rest. The scraps will break down faster than most people realize and leave behind a rich soil deposit and hopefully a small worm bed.

Compost Piles

Again, there is no great mystery here, people have different opinions but I have found that the best size for a compost pile is 3’x3’x3’. At this size, they are easy to manage and still large enough to produce good results.

You can use wire mesh around a frame leave it as a loose pile or my favorite method is to build a three sided box from scrap pallets. I do recommend leaving one side open or removable so that it is easy to turn and mix your pile.

As you gather yard and garden waste simply add it your compost pile. Keep it dampened but not soaking wet, so that the microbes will stay healthy and happy and let them door their job. If you want faster results, add food waste and worms to the mix.

Composting really is just that easy. It takes very little work and while you can get as technical and fancy about it as you would like as a natural process, you have to mess up pretty bad for it not to work. Nature is nothing if not resilient.

Compost Tumblers

Compost tumblers are the Cadillac’s of the composting world they allow you to easily mix, moisten and sift your compost with less effort than you would believe and as an added bonus, by being a closed environment they work even faster than a compost pile with worms.

Composting is a natural a process as there ever existed. If you have taken a walk through the fall leaves or spring forest you have witnessed how it works. It takes minimum effort, rewards you with better soil than you could ever buy, saves you fertilizer cost, and allows you to grow more beautiful flowers and nutritious vegetables than you can buy in any store.

Why Plant Heirloom/Heritage Plants and Seeds

By Steven Depolo from Grand Rapids, MI, USA Heirloom Tomatoes, Carrots, Potatoes

To be honest, this article almost ended up being part of our series on preventing garden pest naturally. Then I realized that just highlighting how heritage plants and heirloom seeds were a natural form of pest control was doing them a great injustice and decided to expand this piece into a slightly more comprehensive article on the advantages of heirloom plant varieties.

What are Heirloom or Heritage Plants?

There really is no complete answer to this question as it seems that different organizations and almost every farmer and gardener has their own ideas as to what makes a plant variety a heritage plant.

As a general rule, though you can consider any plant variety that has occurred naturally, from open pollination and survived to reproduce itself, over several generations to be a heritage plant.

By Smithsonian (subsidiary of department of education)

Some will argue that hybrids of any type shouldn’t be considered as heritage, but to my way of thinking time and nature are the tests, not the purity of the gene pool. I haven’t verified the history, independently, but a friend with a Doctorate in Horticulture told me that at the time Columbus came to the New World there were less than 20 varieties of chilies known.

Look at the wide variety of peppers that we enjoy today. They all are descendants of those originals and had to be hybrids at one time. Now many of them are heirloom.

Pest and Disease Resistant

One of the biggest advantages that heritage plants have is that they have, over time proven themselves to be both disease and pest resistant. Nature is a wonderful thing and by the simple processes of survival and procreation, it is constantly improving breeds and eliminating weak traits from species.

Plants have developed natural resistance to the diseases most prevalent in their environments and strategies for dealing with pests ranging from toxins to symbiotic relationships with predatory insects.

For the gardener, this means less need for human intervention on every level, especially if you choose not only heritage plants, but those native to your geographical area.

Flavor

As hard as it may be to believe it wasn’t really until the rubber tomato and store bought canned goods were developed that the agricultural focus began to shift from quality and nutrition to quantity.

Until that time most farming was done more on a local level and people were more concerned with the taste of food rather than it having a shelf life that was measured in weeks or months rather than days.

People who didn’t raise their own produce bought it from local farmers and pretty much anything that wasn’t eaten immediately was canned, pickled or otherwise preserved at home, for later use.

Saving Money and the Planet

If you still need more reasons to plant Heirloom Seeds, consider the fact that by restraining yourself, just a little, that this year’s crops will provide you with plenty of seeds for next year and that those plants will be even better adapted to your garden. No more buying seeds each year and fighting the same battles over and over again.

And lastly, by planting and raising heritage and heirloom varieties of plants you are helping to preserve the biological diversity that our very future could depend on. More than once in history, we have been taught diversity is security and that it is foolish to narrow down the options that nature provides us.

Whether from blight, as in the Irish Potato Famine, climate or man-made disasters as we have seen repeatedly, it is only by having a diverse and hardy bios that we can help assure our own future.

Preventing Deer, Rabbits and Other Four Legged Pest From Eating Your Garden. ORGANICLY!

 Part 4 in our series on chemical free pest control

Photo: http://www.ForestWander.com

 

If you live in the city, practice urban or container gardening this post might or might not be of interest to you, but if you live in most suburbs or out in the country you know that it doesn’t take long for pest, of the four legged kind, to completely destroy a garden plot or even turn a profitable crop into a total loss.

Four Legged Garden Pest Eat How Much?

An average member of the deer family will eat from 5 to 15 pounds of greens a day, depending on the species. This may seem like a lot of food, but when you take body size into account they are nothing compared to rabbits.

A mature cottontail, the most common wild rabbit in the U.S., will eat 1.25 pounds a day and his cousin, the black-tailed jackrabbit, eats almost nonstop and can consume over 6 pounds of forage every 24 hours. When you consider that an average rabbit colony will contain around 15-20 rabbits you can see that letting rabbits have free access to your garden is about the same as letting a full grown cow graze your greens.

So, how do you keep the grazing deer and the ravaging rabbit from consuming your delectable garden treats before you have a chance to? It is easier than you think. Just follow these handy tips to keep your garden safe, chemical free and totally organic.

Natural Deer Repellents

Deer, for all the damage they can cause, are actually one of the easier animals to deter from your garden and being creatures of habit, they will normally stay with their new food source and stay away once deterred.

Here are a few things that will help if you have a deer problem.

·         In a pump sprayer mix one whole egg, a quarter cup of water and an ounce of hot sauce and spray it on your plants. This mix will withstand light rains because the egg sticks to the leaves.

·         For larger volume applications, mix the following ingredients:

o   1 Cup Milk

o   2 Gallons Water (8 Liters)

o   2 T Cooking Oil

o   2 T Liquid Detergent

o   2 Whole Eggs

o   Spray it on your plants.

·         Even the most persistent deer will become discouraged and look elsewhere after a time. Once they're in the habit of feeding elsewhere, you can let up on the spraying regimen.

·         Place human hair in small cheesecloth sacks and hang around your garden. The scent of the human hair is repellent to deer of all types.

Rabbit And Rodent Proofing Your Garden

Photo: Koenigsegg

 

Rabbits and Rodents are allergic to peppermint and will avoid it like the plague. To pest proof your garden, plant borders of peppermint as a barrier or soak rags in peppermint oil and hang around your garden to keep it pest free.

Since I love mint tea the first option obviously gets my vote.

Creating a 'Mini' Insectary in Your Gardenm (3rd article in our organic best control series)

The idea of intentionally inviting insects into your garden may sound a little crazy to some. That is because, most of us have been raised in a chemical-laden world, where new and improved (sic), man-made has been praised and the natural demonized as inefficient and wasteful. The funny part of this is that the exact opposite is true. Man has never developed a system that worked with the elegance that we find in nature.

Chemical pesticides not only poison and kill insects indiscriminately, they wash into our rivers and streams causing environmental damage and leech into our groundwater supply where they have been found  to contribute to Malignant lymphoma, soft tissue sarcoma and many other forms of cancer.

By learning to work with nature using methods like building Insectaries in our gardens we not only protect our plants in the most natural way possible, we protect ourselves and the planet that we will leave behind to our kids and grandkids.

What is an Insectary

For our purposes, an insectary is a small area of your garden, set aside and planted with plant species that will draw and hold beneficial insects. 

The idea is to invite these predator species into our gardens and then let them do what nature intended them to do, eat the pests that eat our plants.

How to get started

The best method that I have found is to alternate small islands of insectary plants with your normal crops.

If you garden in traditional rows, set aside a portion of every second or third row for a few feet of predator drawing plants or plant them in islands throughout your garden.

If you have beds of plants like a herb garden or traditional flower beds found around most homes, reserve a 4 sq ft area, every 15 to 20 feet around your beds or in the center of larger beds.

What Insectary Plants to Choose?

Every geographical area and type of crop has its own set of damaging garden pests to worry about so it is very difficult to give a blanket answer to this question.

What we can do is supply you with the information you will need to make your own choices.

Garden Pest	Prey Insects
Aphids	Aphidius, Aphidoletes, Hoverflies, Lacewings, Ladybugs, Pirate Bugs
Caterpillars	Ground Beetles
Fungus Gnats	Beneficial Mites
Grubs	Ground Beetles
Insects Pest Eggs	Damsel Bugs (Nabidae)
Mealybugs	Hoverflies
Mites	Lacewings, Ladybugs, Pirate Bugs
Moth, Beetle And Fly Larvae	Wasps (parasitic)
Scale	Pirate Bugs, Lacewings
Slugs	Ground Beetles
Soft bodied Insects	Lacewings
Spidermite	Beneficial Mites, Dicyphus
Thrips	Beneficial Mites, Dicyphus, Pirate Bugs
Whiteflies	Dicyphus, Pirate Bugs, Wasps (parasitic)

Beneficial Insect	Plant
Aphidius	Achillea Filipendulina, Lupin, Sunflowers
Aphidoletes	Lupin
Beneficial Mites	Helianthus Annulus, Shasta Daisy
Damsel Bugs (Nabidae)	Fennel
Dicyphus	Digitalis
Ground Beetles	Amaranthus
Hoverflies	Convolvulus Minor, Queen Anne's Lace, Iberis Umbellata, Statice, Lupin, Parsley, Pincushion Flower, Yarrow
Lacewings	Alyssum, Dill, Angelica Gigas, Coreopsis, Cosmos Bipinnatus, Queen Anne's Lace, Fennel, Tansy
Ladybugs	Achillea Filipendulina, Dill, Convolvulus Minor, Queen Anne's Lace, Fennel, Tansy, Yarrow
Pirate Bugs	Helianthus Annulus, Shasta Daisy, Sunflower
Tachinid flies	Alyssum, Lemon Balm, Parsley,
Wasps (parasitic)	Coreopsis,  Cosmos Bipinnatus, Dill, Statice, Lemon balm, Parsley, Pincushion Flower, Sunflower, Yarrow

Insectary Secrets

Different insects are obviously attracted to different types of plants and have different environmental requirements. Ground Beetles need to have ample ground cover and low growing plants to thrive and Lacewings like to have high, shady, protected areas to lay their eggs. Because of this, it is best to plant a variety of plants in your Insectary Plots.

Mix and match ground covers like clover and vetch with low-growing herbs like thyme, dill and various mints and then add taller composite flowers such as daisies and chamomile. The more variety you have, the better.

Patients

The other secret to growing an insectary and using predatory insects to keep your garden pest free is to remember that you are working with a natural process. Even if you order bugs or eggs online you are not going to see a dramatic change overnight.

Nature takes time to work. The best you can do to hurry it along is to seed and provide a proper environment for your little pest control agents to live in and then wait.

On the good side, once you have your Garden Insectary in place, all you have to do is maintain it year to year and your plants will stay protected without any further expense or work. As long as you provide them a good home, your little worker bugs will keep your garden pest free and even help enrich your soil with their waste.