Natural Pest Control for Gardeners and Landscapers: It's a Bug-eat-Bug World

The easiest and cheapest way to minimize the numbers of insects that damage your plants is to encourage predator insects that will eat the plant-damaging insects for free. The easiest and cheapest way to encourage these insect predators is to stop killing them - stop using pesticides in the garden. There may be a brief surge in the plant eaters, but the predator populations will expand to control them.

Think of the advantages for you - no buying pesticides, no weekends wasted spraying pesticides, not wories about pesticide residues on your vegetables. Just sit back and watch the food chain in action. For sex, violence and mayhem, it matches anything you can find on television.

Ladybugs and Lacewings

The familiar glossy red ladybug and the delicate golden-eyed lacewing species are voracious aphid eaters as larvae and adults. I don't bother buying ladybugs at the nursery because aphid-infested plants give off a chemical that attracts ladybugs.

If you panic at the sight of aphids and spray them with pesticides, you will never have enough aphids to keep ladybug and lacewing babies alive. If you accept that there will be hordes of aphids on a couple of plants for a week or so, the predators will arrive and lay their eggs on the food source. A week or so after that, the aphids will be under control.

Both ladybugs and lacewing adults eat pollen and nectar, so be sure to have something blooming for them.

Mud Daubers and Other Predatory Wasps

Mud daubers are solitary hunting wasps, and their favorite prey is large spiders, giving them the local name of "tarantula hawk". I often see them running under pots and into the lizard shelters, looking for black widows. They sting the spider to paralyze it, then haul it to their nest to feed their young. The nests are mud blobs, or elegantly shaped mud vases, stuck to walls in shaded spots. To attract mud daubers, all you need is a muddy spot they can gather nest material from and some insect prey.