As we are coming up on our second Spring/Summer gardening season, we are noticing some promising signs. Beneficial Insects!!!! Before I mention and show you pictures of our beneficial insects, let me take you back to the beginning of our gardening experience.
Being new gardeners, we weren't keen to companion planting and attracting beneficial insects. We just put some plants in the ground, amended the soil and went for it. After a few weeks we started noticing our plants being attacked!!!! Our worst pest was the pesky cucumber beetle (shown below). I absolutely hated these things!!!! They ate almost any and everything in the garden...not just the cucumber plants. Several times our garden was over run by cucumber beetles. We did end up using some organic pesticides (which we wanted to avoid).
From our last season garden we have many herbs that are starting to flower and many vegetables (broccoli and cauliflower) that are starting to seed and flower due to the warm and mild winter we have had here in Rosenburg. These flowers are already attracting some beneficial insects and it's only February 19th!!!! This means that when we start planting our Spring/Summer garden, we will already have beneficials around to help us combat the bad pests!!!! Our plan is to be pesticide free from here on out....even if it's the organic pesticide. We don't want any chemicals!!!!
The Bee
The pollinator!!!! There are so many bees in our garden right now. They are loving the flowering broccoli!!! Take a close look at the first picture....I spy four bees!!! There were over 30 bees playing in the broccoli!!
The Hover fly
Hover flies are great to control aphid populations. We have a major issue with aphids in the past growing season also. Check out the hover flies on the dill!!!!
The moral of this blog...we are excited to have promising signs of a pesticide free growing season!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment