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.

Chemical Free Organic Pest Control: Smoke Your Garden

This is going to be the shortest post in this organic pest control series and very likely one of the most controversial. When I have mentioned it to friends, they either fall in love with the idea or tell me it is pure BS. To me, it is just another way of re-purposing garden waste

Since I haven’t been able to find much either way in my research but have used this method of pest control successfully, in my own gardens, for several years now, all I can say is “I” recommend it and encourage you to give it a try. What I’m talking about is smoking your garden.

Blowing Smoke

First, let’s be clear, When I say smoke your garden, I’m not talking about growing tobacco or ganja. I’m talking about applying smoke to your garden as a way to control the pest.

The process is very simple and best used on days with very little to no breeze blowing and the weather is not too dry. It takes moister for the scent of the smoke to cling to plants and if they or the air is too dry it won’t hold.

1.      Take an old pan, shovel, banana leaf, or anything that won’t burn easily and pile moist but not wet grass, leaves and other combustible waste in it and start a small smoldering fire. If you have been cooking out with charcoal, the left over coals from your pit work great as a base fire.

2.      Place the smoking fire in your garden, allowing the smoke to flow over your plants and trees for 10-15 minutes and then move it to treat another area.

3.      Repeat a couple times a week.

4.      That is pretty much it.

What Pest Smoke Helps With

Based on my personal experience, smoking your plants helps on all fronts, with the exception of ants. All animals from insects to the larger foragers instinctively avoid fire and the smell of smoke is abhorrent to them.

The smoke itself drives the vermin out and the lingering smell acts as a preventive measure.

I would like to add as a note of caution here that if you have a beneficial insectary in your garden to try and avoid these areas as best you can. Predator insects and pollinators will return faster than foraging insects, but they will still be affected.

Mosquito Control

An added bonus to this method of pest control is that beyond common garden pest it seems to be especially effective and controlling mosquitoes. With all of the news we have been seeing about mosquito borne illnesses, this is a benefit that I feel is worth mentioning.

Zero Waste

This method is very simple, though it can be time-consuming. It is zero waste process, as it takes lawn and garden waste and converts it to ash that is a very healthy aid in maintaining your soil quality. Just throw it on your garden when finished burning.

Give this method of natural pest control a try and let me know what you think. As always I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Diatomaceous Earth for Chemical Free Organic Pest Control

As a continuation of our series on chemical free organic pest control, today we are going to discuss one of my personal favorites, Diatomaceous Earth.

The reason that I am so fond of DE is the simple fact that, despite it having some limitations, it can be

Common Garden Insects

used both in the garden and in the home for a wide variety of pests. Best of all Diatomaceous Earth is completely natural and nontoxic. It is safe for you, your pets and the environment when used with care.

What is Diatomaceous Earth

Diatomaceous Earth is the fossilized skeletons of prehistoric crustaceans called diatoms. Over the millennium these tiny creatures died settled to the bottoms of rivers, streams and seas, leaving deposits from which they are now mined today.

Comprised almost completely of silica and small amounts of calcium, Diatomaceous Earth appears to the naked eye as a white powder and when viewed under a microscope closely resembles a pile of broken glass, which in some ways are exactly what it is and the secret to how I works.

How Does Diatomaceous Earth Kill Insects and Slugs

The mechanics of how DE works is elegant in its simplicity. Above, I said, it looks like microscopic glass shards and it does its job exactly as if it were. The tiny silica crystals act as an abrasive scratching through the exoskeleton of insects and the sensitive exscretionary membranes of garden slugs and essentially take away their ability to hold fluids. They dehydrate and die.

How to Apply Diatomaceous Earth

In the Garden

In your garden DE is used much as you would powdered pesticides. Sprinkle it on the soil to control emerging slugs and insects and use a duster on the foliage of your plants for insect control. Here, though, is where DE’s weakness begins to show up. When it becomes damp it losses much of its effectiveness and in wet conditions is almost totally useless.

The other word of caution I will add about using Diatomaceous Earth is that just like most pesticides, beneficial insects have no protection from it. That is why I limit my garden use, to ground applications or cover plants with nets to protect valuable pollinators like bees and butterflies from coming in contact with it.

In the Home

In your home Diatomaceous Earth can be applied in cracks, crevices even around bedding and behind furnishings. Its consistency is much like talcum powder and non-abrasive to people and animals.

What Insects will Diatomaceous Earth Control

This by no means a comprehensive list, mainly because I am yet to find an insect that is not effected when exposed to DE but it will give you some idea how versatile this stuff is.

•        Ants

•        Bedbugs

•        Carpet Beetles

•        Caterpillars

•        Centipedes

•        Cockroaches

•        Colorado Potato Beetles

•        Crickets

•        Darkling Beetles

•        Earwigs

•        Fleas

•        Flour Beetles

•        Grain Beetles

·         Japanese Beetles

•        Millipedes

•        Pill bugs

•        Silverfish

•        Slugs

•        Sow bugs

•        Spiders

As you can see from this list just about any hard bodied insect is fair pray for Diatomaceous Earth and most soft bodied varieties are.

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.