As human sickness may often be stopped by healthful conditions, so pests might be kept away by strict garden cleanliness. Lots of waste are lodging places for the breeding of insects. I don’t think a compost pile will do the harm, but unkempt, uncared-for spots appear to invite difficulty.
If we could garden without any interference from the pests which attack plants, then indeed gardening would be a simple matter. But all of the time we must watch out for these little 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 an aid 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 eat other and damaging insects. Some sorts of ladybirds do this good deed. The ichneumon-fly helps too. And toads are wonders in the number of insects they can consume at one meal. The toad deserves very kind treatment from all of us.
Each gardener should try to make her or his garden into a place attractive to birds and toads. A good birdhouse, grain spattered about in early spring, a water-place, are invitations for birds to remain 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 is good 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 a plant with perhaps a carpeting of damp leaves, would appear awfully fine to a toad.
There are two general classes of insects known by the way they do their work. One kind gnaws at the plant actually taking pieces of it into its system. This sort 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 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 can we fight these chaps? The gnawing fellows could be caught with poison sprayed on plants, which they take into their bodies with the plant. The Bordeaux mix which is a poison sprayed on plants for this reason.
In the other case the only thing is to attack the insect direct. So certain pesticides, as they are called, are sprayed on the plant to fall on the insect. They do alethal work of attacking, in one way or another, the body of the insect.
Sometimes we are much uneasy 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 in some measure by the work done, and in some measure by seeing the insect itself. This latter thing isnot always so easy to do. 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 could be a hard query because his family is an enormous 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 during the day and working by night, it is tough 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, he’s prepared for them. A particularly 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.
Of course, plant lice are way more common. Those we see are often green in color. But they could be red, yellow or brown. Lice are simple enough to find since they’re always sticking 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 harder to cope 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 are 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 almost 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 virtually any other single insect pest. You can discover them in the following way. There is a trick for bringing them to the outer surface of the ground in the day time. You see they rest in 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 are quite sure to hide close to the plants they are feeding on. So water the ground with some nice clean lime water. This can disturb them, and up they’ll poke to see what the problem is.
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