Category Archives: Garden Advice

Pests & Pollination: Attract Beneficial Insects

Last week we discussed strategies for conquering weeds in an organic garden. This week we’re moving on to another chore loathed by natural farmers, gardeners, and growers everywhere, controlling pests. One excellent way to ensure pest populations don’t get out of control is to ensure you have plenty of beneficial insects. When we think of beneficial insects, we often think of pollinators like bees and butterflies, but insects have so much more to offer us, gardeners! Many beneficial insects prey on pests and their eggs and larvae. Learn how to attract beneficial insects to your garden.

A lacewing on a leaf (attract beneficial insects)
Lacewing (Chrysopidae spp.)

What are Beneficial Insects?

Beneficial insects help us in the garden by pollinating plants, feeding on pests, and parasitizing pests. In our area, some of these include:

  • Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus)
  • Wolf Spider (Lycosidae spp.)
  • Rusty Patched BumbleBee (Bombus affinis)
  • Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes)
  • Carolina Mantis (Stagmomantis Carolina)
  • Yellow Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia)
  • Orange Sulfur (Colias eurytheme)
  • Braconid Wasp (Cotesia congregates)
  • Damsel Bugs (Nabidae spp.)
  • Mabel Orchard Orbweaver Spider (Leucauge argyrobapta)
  • Southeastern Blueberry Bee (Habropoda laboriosa)
  • Lacewing (Chrysopidae spp.)
  • Big-Eyed Bug (Geocoris spp.)
  • Blue Orchard Mason Bee (Osmia lignaria)
  • Striped Lynx Spider (Oxyopes salticus)
  • American Copper Butterfly (Lycaena phlaeas Americana)

These are just a fraction of the insect species hard at work in our yards and gardens! Of course, there are beneficial animals too. Birds and bats can also help keep pest populations down and pollinate plants.

Further Reading:

dead leaves (attract beneficial insects)
Dead leaves are excellent habitat for many beneficial insects.

Habitat Features to Attract Beneficial Insects

All these helpful insects need a habitat that provides the essentials of food, water, and shelter, just like we do. 

Don’t Clean Up Too Much

Many beneficial insects need places for themselves or their eggs to overwinter. Blue Orchard Mason Bees, for example, overwinter their eggs in cavities in plants like the hollow stems of flowers or reeds. Depending on the species, Lacewings over winter in their adult or pupa stage in piles of dead leaves or other organic debris. Resisting the urge to keep your garden spotless can provide these insects with better habitat.

Plant a Windbreak

Sometimes, gardeners will plant windbreaks to help with wind-related issues like lodging corn, but few people probably consider that it makes life much easier for beneficial insects. A windbreak or hedgerow can help slow wind through your garden, creating calmer flying conditions for bees, dragonflies, lady beetles, and other flyers.

Provide Water

Especially in the hot dry days of summer, insects need water just like people do. If you have water on your property like a pond or creek you can help keep it full and cool by allowing the banks to grow in trees and shrubs that will shade it. If you don’t have a natural water source, don’t worry you can make an insect waterer! All you need is some sort of clean small trough and stones to place in it. The stones are critical, as insects need an easy way to get down to the water and to climb out. Change the water regularly. 

Avoid Pesticides of Any Kind

Sometimes when we see the organic label we assume something is safe. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Organic pesticides may be much safer for people and often waterways than conventional pesticides. However, both conventional and organic pesticides kill insects and neither of them differentiate between types of insects. If you have something that kills caterpillars to get rid of the cabbage loopers any swallowtail caterpillar that comes into contact with it will be effected too.

Flowers & Plants that Attract Beneficial Insects

Flowers aren’t just for bees and butterflies! Lacewings, parasitic wasps, lady beetles, and other insects use them too. For example, the larval stage of Convergent Lady Beetles feeds on insects, but the adult stage feeds on nectar, pollen, and honeydew. The females need a certain amount of these foods before laying eggs.

Conversely, many species, including bees and butterflies, need plants that aren’t in their flowering stage. For example, the caterpillars of the Black Swallowtail Butterfly will feed on the leaves of carrots, dill, fennel, and parsley.

Selecting Plants & Flowers

While poppies, roses, tulips, and hydrangeas are all stunning flowers that are great for human enjoyment, they may not be a favorite among beneficial insects. Flowers that are native or user-friendly typically will attract and support more beneficial insects.

Native Plants
Native Shrubs
  • Eastern Sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus)
  • Southern Highbush Blueberry (Vaccinium formosum)
  • Allegheny Serviceberry (Amelanchier laevis)
  • False Indigo Bush (Amorpha fruticosa)
  • American Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana)
Native Trees
  • Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis)
  • Sourwood (Oxydendrum arboreum)
  • Tulip Poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera)
  • Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum)
  • Black Cherry (Prunus serotina)

Your local extension agency may also be able to provide more information on native species specifically suited to your area.

User-Friendly Flowers

Generally, beneficial insects find get the most food from a few different types of flowers: those with flat umbels of tiny flowers (looks a bit like a lace umbrella) like Queen Anne’s Lace, those with daisy-like flowers made up of tiny flowers like sunflowers, and those with loose spikes of tube-like flowers like mint.

These are just a few plants beneficial insects love. While it’s still perfectly fine to have and enjoy other flowers and plants, it’s important to plant some that consider our local insects.

Incorporating these strategies into your garden plan can help you attract beneficial insects and have a successful season. Happy growing!

 

 

Organic Weed Management

Spring is an exciting time in the garden. We have beds full of freshly sprouting plants, transplants hardening off, and perennials returning to life. Many of you may even be eating the year’s first salads or tender asparagus. While it’s an incredibly fun time in the garden, it’s a good time to look ahead too. They may not be a problem yet, but soon, weeds will start trying to outcompete our precious vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Learn about the different methods of organic weed management and keep up with them from the start.

Cultivate

Weeds are easiest to take care of when they’re small. When you’re direct seeding, mark your rows well so that you can conquer small weeds early, even if they’re too tiny to tell what they are. There are several ways to do this, but I have a couple of favorite tools for keeping up with small weeds. 

One of my favorite tools for this is the stirrup or hoop hoe. It has a long wooden handle and a U-shaped blade that oscillates back and forth, cutting weeds off just below the surface as you move it. 

For longer beds, I like to use a wheel hoe with similar stirrup hoe-type blades attached. Wheel hoes generally have single (one blade) or double configurations (two blades). If you have one of these, it’s a good idea to plant your crops so that a wheel hoe can easily be maneuvered through the rows, at least while your plants are small. 

Flame Weed

Flame weeding comes at the cost of propane, but it can be a huge labor savor. When weeds are between 1 and 4 inches, it’s nearly 100% effective. A basic flame weeder consists of a propane tank, hose, and torch, which allows you to burn weeds. Typically, the propane tank is carried in a backpack-style carrier, but this may be unnecessary for small gardens.

Flame weeding has become increasingly popular among small commercial farms. Today you can find flame weeder torches that can be rolled over the bed or even carts that include multiple torch heads and spot for the propane tank for those doing large amounts of garden space.

The goal of flame weeding isn’t to burnt the plant in its entirety, just slowly pass the flame over the plants. The heat damages the plants’ cell structures, and they die over the next few hours or days. Flame weeding is a great technique to use just before planting. If you already have crops in the bed, be sure to avoid getting too close to them.

Austrian Winter Peas (cover crop) in flower as part of organic weed managementRotate Your Crops & Employ Cover Crops

Crop rotation helps prevent soils from becoming unbalanced and makes it more challenging for certain weeds to become established. Including some fast-growing crops in your plan is a great idea that can help outcompete weeds in trouble areas. These crops may include winter squash, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, and dent corn. 

Cover crops are an essential part of any crop rotation plan. They help build soil structure, improve fertility, and suppress weeds. Some rapidly growing cover crops like buckwheat can quickly outcompete many weeds and are great for problem areas. Some cover crops like mustard, oats, rye, and Sudan grass are allelopathic, producing a chemical inhibiting weed growth. Cover crop residue also serves as a mulch in no-till systems.

Solarize Your Beds

Another method you can use to prepare a bed and kill weeds is to solarize the bed. Place a clear plastic tarp over your bed and allow it to heat the soil and any weeds that are growing. Typically, this is done for weed control, but some studies have found this heat treatment also helps kill some pathogens. 

Keep the Areas Around Your Garden Cleared

Weeds can quickly spread into gardens from unmowed paths or perimeters. Weeds going to seed in your yard can be spread into your garden with just a bit of breeze. Some weeds also reproduce by stolons or creeping vines that root at the nodes to form new plants. Keeping these cut back will help reduce the weeds you need to handle.

Don’t Water Your Weeds

Another way you can lessen the weed growth in your garden is to avoid watering them. Sprinklers are a common and affordable choice for many gardeners but don’t focus water on your plants. They water all the weeds around them too! This is wasteful and encourages weed growth. If it’s an option for you, consider switching to drip tape or soaker hoses, which can direct water to the roots of your crops and not the entire garden.

Minimize Soil Disruption

Many weed species have seeds that can lay dormant in the soil for years until they are disturbed and exposed to light. In a natural setting, this helps the plants take advantage of new openings, but in our case, it makes them ready-made to colonize fresh-tilled earth quickly. Opting for no-till or minimal-till can help you see a decrease in weed germination over several years. 

Mulch

Apply a layer of mulch to your garden beds as soon as you can. Mulch helps prevent some seeds from sprouting by blocking out light and is tough for young weeds to go through. You can use various materials as mulch, including grass clippings, old leaves, straw, wood chips, or hay.White bindweed flower (organic weed management)

What Can You Learn From Your Weeds?

Sometimes the weeds we struggle with tell us something about our gardens. While it isn’t always the case, if you have a lot of one weed species, it could indicate something about your soil. Here are a few common weeds and the types of conditions you’re most likely to find them in:

  • Crabgrass (Digitaria spp.): sandy soil, compacted soil, low calcium, low nutrients 
  • Bindweed (Convolvulus spp.): poorly drained, compacted, crusty soil
  • Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale): compacted soil
  • Dock (Rumex spp.): poorly drained soil
  • Henbit (Lamium amplexicaule): high nitrogen
  • Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album): rich soil, high nitrogen
  • Mullein (Verbascum thapsus): acidic soil, low fertility.
  • Mustard (Brassica spp.): dry, sandy soil, high in phosphorous
  • Plantain (Plantago spp.): compacted soil (often heavy clay), acidic soil, low fertility
  • Pigweed (Amaranthus spp.): Rich soil, high levels of nitrogen
  • Quackgrass (Elymus repens): compacted soil
  • Quickweed (Galinsoga spp.): high levels of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium 

You can have perfect soil and still have weeds, but sometimes it’s worth exploring why a particular weed is so prevalent in your garden. If you haven’t had a soil test in a while, they’re always a good idea.

 

Weeds may not seem like a problem right now, but they will be if we let them get out of hand. Use these organic weed management techniques to stay on top of the weeds and have a productive, enjoyable summer garden. 

Saving Seed: Ancient Beginnings

For thousands of years, human history has been intertwined with seeds. We depended on the seeds we grew and stewarded to provide food, medicine, fiber for clothing, dye, and many of the other building blocks of our lives. Saving seed altered the way we lived, farmed, ate, and celebrated. Vandana Shiva probably put it best when she said, “seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.”

Our journey with seed saving and agriculture has been long and complex. Humans didn’t just decide one day to give up our nomadic lifestyles and settle down; we transitioned to agricultural societies over thousands of years. So when did it first begin, and why? Why did hunter-gathers start saving seeds and then selecting them for specific traits? 

Seeds drying on racks (saving seed)Why Did Humans Begin Saving Seed?

Today, there are many qualities we focus on when saving seed. We select for traits like flavor, vigor, cold-hardiness, color, size, drought tolerance, and more. These qualities probably weren’t the focus of ancient seed savers. They had to deal with other issues first.

So far, researchers have found that hunter-gathers first started to save and select the seeds of regionally available grain crops. The first characteristic they probably focused on was the “non-shattering trait.” In wild plants, being able to spread your seed is highly advantageous. Plants disperse their seeds in several ways, including wind, animals, and water. In wild cereals, the seed heads shatter, and the seeds drop from the plant as soon as they dry and mature.

This trait presented a considerable roadblock to efficiently gathering large amounts of grains for humans. They had to time gathering grain just right before it was dropped or blown off by the wind. It was also much harder to harvest without waste, leaving so much up to chance.

Researchers found some of the earliest evidence of humans selecting for non-shattering rice along the Lower Yangtze River in China. The non-shattering gene was also found in einkorn (wild wheat) in Tell Qaramel, an archeological site in modern-day northern Syria, and in barley and emmer (wheat) in several parts of the Fertile Crescent or what is now portions of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Kuwait, Turkey, and Iran (Allaby et al., 2017).

Aerial view of Tell Qaramel
Aerial view of Tell Qaramel

Developing grains with the non-shattering trait that retained their seeds was an enormous breakthrough for humans and would have improved the reliability and productivity of these cereals. It also represents when our lives began to intertwine with seeds. Humans were not just gatherers anymore; we became seed savers.

When Did Humans Begin Saving Seed?

So when did this all begin? Studies in recent years have shown that initial seed selection for those non-shattering traits began occurring long before we initially believed, dating back to the Pleistocene glacial era roughly 30,000 years ago (Allaby et al., 2017)!

These initial seed selections did not mean these early seed savers were becoming full-time farmers. These were still largely nomadic hunter-gathers supplementing their diet with wild cereals that they helped encourage and cultivate. Humans throughout the world were still mainly living nomadic, hunter-gather lifestyles until roughly 12,000 years ago, during a period which has been dubbed the “Neolithic Revolution” (National Geographic Society, 2022).

Ancient terrace rice fields in Yunnan Province, China
Ancient terrace rice fields in Yunnan Province, China

The Development of Agriculture

There is evidence of fig tree orchards in the Jordan Valley from roughly 11,300 years ago, signs of squash cultivation in Mexico date to at least 10,000 years ago, and cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs were all domesticated in the Fertile Crescent between 13,000 to 10,000 years ago (National Geographic Society, 2022). So what changed to make humans take up farming full-time? Scientists are not entirely sure.

In some regions like the Near East, this period brought about climatic changes that suited the production of annual plants. In other areas, a decline in natural resources as populations grew may have forced people to supplement their diets (Weitzel, 2019). An acceleration of domestication of plant varieties also coincides with the invention of sickle farming technology about 8,000 years ago (Hays, 2017). Some researchers even believe that agriculture took off as societies began to recognize private property rights. Simply put, humans like to own stuff (Chatterjee, 2013). 

While these are all relevant theories, none of them likely caused the shift towards agriculture in its entirety. Humans moved towards agricultural societies for different combinations of reasons that varied over regions and cultures. 

From these humble beginnings, humans continued to grow and save seed. Cultures across the world bred and stewarded their own staple crops and livestock. These varieties became essential parts of our everyday lives, our heritage, and our culture. 

Saving Seed Today

Today, there are relatively few people saving seed. We are no longer hunter-gatherers trying to supplement our diets or subsistence farmers trying to grow every calorie we consume. Most of us don’t even grow a portion of our food, but today seed saving is just as important as it was thousands of years ago. When we fail to continue the work of stewarding seeds, we lose thousands of years of work and information. We lose biodiversity. We lose culture. We lose flavor. We lose celebration. 

If you have the ability to take on one extra garden project this year, save seed from your favorite variety.

References

Allaby, R. G., Stevens, C., Lucas, L., Maeda, O., & Fuller, D. Q. (2017). Geographic mosaics and changing rates of cereal domestication. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 372(1736). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0429

Chatterjee, R. (2023, March 30). Why Humans Took Up Farming: They Like To Own Stuff. NPR. Retrieved May 13, 2013, from https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/05/13/183710778/why-humans-took-up-farming-they-like-to-own-stuff

Hays, B. (2017, October 23). Humans altered the evolution of crops 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. UPI. https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/10/23/Humans-altered-the-evolution-of-crops-10000-years-earlier-than-previously-thought/3981508767201/

National Geographic Society (2022, July 8). The Development of Agriculture. National Geographic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/development-agriculture/

Weitzel, E. M. (2019). Declining Foraging Efficiency in the Middle Tennessee River Valley Prior to Initial Domestication. American Antiquity. https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2018.86