One of the ways to reduce pesticide use in your garden is to attract beneficial insects to it. These insects keep the bad bugs in check. A good way to do that is to interplant flowers in your garden. The flowers then act as shelter and food places for the beneficial insects, who will move to your vegetable plants to eat their natural prey when they present themselves.
Stop Spraying
If you do interplant flowers in your garden, be careful never to spray them. In fact, spraying indescriminatly is probably what caused the problem in the first place. When you spray, you kill the benefical insects that keep pests in check. The bad bugs come back and have no preditors. They then grow out of control unitl you spray them again. Stop the spraying cycle now.
You can also make a border of flowers around your garden to attract these beneficial insects, but it is more effective to interplant than to make a border.
Flowers For Beneficial Insects
Here are seven flowers that make good border or interplant candidates:
- Bachelor’s Buttons also called cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus)
- Sweet Alyssum (Lobularia maritima)
- Borage (Borago officinalis)
- Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum)
- Anise Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum)
- Golden Marguerite (Anthemis tinctoria)
- Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare)
- Mexican Maragold (Tagetes erecta)
There are many more candidates, of course. These plants just provide a lot of shelter, nectar, and other food for beneficial insects that attracts them to your vegetables.
Buying Bugs
What about buying beneficial insects such as lady beetles, lacewings, and other critters sold by some catalogs? Well, that is an expensive way to go. You can just plant plenty of flowers, including the ones listed above, around and in your garden and attract the beneficials naturally. The benefit of that is the beneficial insects appear when the bad bugs get out of hand. If you buy beneficials and stick them in your garden, they may not have enough food to stick around at the time you place them there. Then you have wasted your money. So save the money or spend it on flower seed.
Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden.
In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.
