LIVE Beneficial Bugs for Pest Management

If you have noticed bad bugs eating your favorite plants, attack them with good bugs. There are many great beneficial bugs that will help you protect your prize plants and prevent pests from taking over.

Ladybugs prefer to eat aphids and will devour up to 50 a day, but they will also attack scale, mealy bugs, boil worm, leaf hopper, and corn ear worm. They dine only on insects and do not harm vegetation in any way.

Ladybugs should always be released after sundown since they only fly in the daytime. During the night, they will search the area for food and stay as long as there is food for them to eat. The more they eat, the more eggs they lay and the more insect-eating larvae you will have. It is best if the area has been recently watered. Ladybugs tend to crawl up and toward light. So release them in small groups at the base of plants and shrubs that have aphids or other insects, and in the lower parts of trees.

Praying Mantids eat a wide variety of garden pests. In their younger stages they eat aphids, thrips, flies & maggots, small caterpillars, leafhoppers, white grubs and other soft-bodied insects. Mature Mantids feed on larger caterpillars, earwigs, chinch bugs, sow bugs, beetles, grasshoppers and other large insects.

Put the egg case in a bush, hedge, limb, or anything more than two feet above the ground. The egg case may be inserted in the fork of a branch or hung with a piece of string or needle and thread run through the outside of the case. Hanging will help keep birds and rodents from eating the eggs in the case. If ants are in the area oiling the string will help keep them away.

Beneficial Nematodes (BN) attack more than 230 kinds of soil dwelling and wood boring pests, such as flea larvae, white grubs, cutworms, corn root worms, strawberry weevils, gypsy moth larvae, cabbage root maggots, fungus gnat larvae, and many more.

BN may be released by spraying with water, mixing with mulch and applying directly to the soil or potting mix, or injecting into burrows. They may be used any time of year, as long as the ground is not frozen. Do not release in direct sunlight, as this will kill them. See directions for details.

These earthworms will eat the soil in your garden and cast it back with 5 times more nitrogen, 1.5 times more calcium, 3 times more magnesium, 7 times more phosphates, 11 times more potash and 40% more humus.

Plant nutrients from earthworms (odorless castings) retain moisture, don’t leach out with watering and are released slowly instead of in one large dose. Worm castings feed plants for weeks, even months. They will neutralize acid or alkaline excess and they don’t use up organic carbons, as chemicals often do.

On their endless journey through your garden (worms don’t sleep), earthworms leave behind a vast network of nutrition-lined tunnels which are valuable air spaces. This gets oxygen to the roots and allows the roots more room to grow. The castings-rich soil will hold more water so there’s much less run-off. Hard packing is impossible -- Mother Nature does not own a spade.

All Plant life benefits enormously from nutrition and aeration by earthworms. Production goes up. Color is better. Fruits and vegetables taste better. Susceptibility to disease goes down. Best of all, you get more pleasure from your gardening and your garden.

DIRECTIONS: Dig 6 inch diameter, 1 foot deep holes several feet apart though out the garden. Fill with water and let drain. Put one or two handfuls of worms in each hole, fill loosely with soil and compost (cuttings, table scraps, etc.) This will give the worms a quick meal. Water the area and apply mulch if possible over and around the holes. Keep the area watered.