Soggy days can lead to active pests for your garden. These critters have been waiting to chomp, chomp, and chomp. With a drier weather pattern ahead, and warmer temperatures, your garden may need some help fighting off pests.
You can fight buggy fire with fire! Here are a few helpful critters to have in your garden, and ways to attract them:
1. Lady bugs. These red and black spotted beetles are anything but dainty. They will power through aphids, mites, and mealy bugs fast. You can attract lady bugs to your garden by planting angelica, coreopsis, dill, fennel, and yarrow. Check with your local nursery as some sell lady bugs, or order online.
2. Praying Mantis. These majestic, yet ferocious, insects will eat most garden pests, even the good ones. You can buy the egg cases at some garden stores, or online. Once they hatch, they go to work and quickly devour many bad insects day and night.
3. Lacewings. To attract these aphid eating, and other larva eating, insects, plant some alyssum, coreopsis, cosmos and angelica. You may be able to purchase the online. No caterpillar, mealy bug, or white fly will be safe with these around your garden.
Natural bug control is always better than using chemicals. Do a web search to find out more about good garden bugs and how they help your garden grow!