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GARDEN PESTS

Gardening would be a simple matter if we could garden without any interference from the pests which attack plants. But all the time we must look out for these small hungry pests little in size, but tremendous in the damage that they can create.

Human illness can often be prevented by cleaner healthful conditions, so pests may be kept away by hard-and-fast garden cleanliness. Mounds of waste are living accommodation spots for the breeding of insects. A compost pile will help to draw some of these pests away from your garden, but unkempt, uncared-for areas seem to invite trouble.

There are certain aids to keeping pest populations down. The constant stirring up of the soil by earthworms is an aid in keeping the soil open to air and water. Many of our common birds feed on insects. The sparrows, robins, chickadees, meadow larks and orioles are all examples of birds who help in this way. Some insects feed on other and harmful insects. Some kinds of ladybugs do this good deed. The ichneumon-fly helps too. And toads are wonders in the number of insects they can consume at one meal. The toad deserves very kind treatment from all of us.

Each gardener should try to make her or his garden into a place attractive to birds and toads. A good birdhouse, grain sprinkled about in early spring, a water-place, are invitations for birds to stay a while in your garden. If you wish toads, fix things up for them too. During a hot summer day a toad likes to rest in the shade. By night he is ready to go forth to eat but not to kill, since toads prefer live food. How can one "fix up" for toads? Well, one thing to do is to prepare a retreat, quiet, dark and damp. A few stones of some size underneath the shade of a shrub with perhaps a carpeting of damp leaves, would appear to be a very fine home to a toad.

There are two general classes of insects known by the way they do their work. One kind gnaws at the plant really taking pieces of it into its system. This kind of insect has a mouth fitted to do this work. Grasshoppers and caterpillars are of this sort. The other kind sucks the juices from a plant. This, in some ways, is the worst sort. Plant lice belong here, as do mosquitoes, which prey on us. All the scale insects fasten themselves on plants, and suck out the life of the plants.

Now can we fight these garden attackers? The gnawing types may be caught with poison sprayed upon plants, which they take into their bodies with the plant. The Bordeaux mixture which is a poison sprayed upon plants for this purpose. In the other case the only thing is to attack the insect direct. So certain insecticides or pesticides, as they are called, are sprayed on the plant to fall upon the insect. They directly attack the body of the insect.

Sometimes we are often troubled with underground insects at work. You have seen a garden covered with ant hills. This question is constantly being asked, 'How can I tell what insect is doing the destructive work?' Well, you can tell partially by the work done, and partially by seeing the insect itself. Seeing the insect is not always easy to accomplish. I had cutworms one season and never saw one. I saw only the damage done. If stalks of tender plants are cut clean off, you can be pretty sure the cutworm is residing underground. What does he look like? Well, that is a hard question because the family is a large one.

Should you see a grayish striped or mostly white caterpillar, you may be sure it is a cutworm. But because of its habit of resting in the ground during the day and eating by night, it is hard to catch sight of one. The cutworm is around early in the season ready to cut the flower stalks of the hyacinths. When the peas come on a bit later, he is ready for them. A very good way to block him off is to put paper collars, or tin ones, around the plant stalks. These collars should be about an inch away from the plant.

Of course, plant lice are more common. Those we see are often green in colour. But they may be red, yellow or brown. Lice are easy enough to find since they're always sticking to their host. As sucking insects they have to cling to a plant for food, and one is pretty sure to find them usually on the underside of leaves. But the biting insects do their work, and then go hide. That makes them much harder to deal with.

Rose slugs do great damage to the rose bushes. They chew up the body of the leaves, so that just the vein is left. They are soft-bodied, green above and yellow below. A beetle, the striped beetle, attacks young melons and squash leaves. It eats the leaf by riddling out holes in it. This beetle, as its name implies, is striped. The back is black with yellow stripes running lengthwise. Another pest that will attack your garden under special conditions is the gypsy moth caterpiller. Gypsy Moths usually feed on the leaves of hardwood trees, but will eat nearly any leaf when their food supply runs out. This happens when millions of these pests appear in certain regions of the country and they completely devour all of the hardwood leaves in the affected area. Birds and toads will not eat gypsy moth caterpillers because they taste so bitter.

Then there are the slugs, which are garden pests. The slug will devour almost any garden plant, whether it is a flower or a vegetable. They lay lots of eggs in old garbage heaps. Do you see why you need to clean up rubbish? The slugs do more harm in the garden than almost any other single insect pest. You can discover them in the following way. There is a trick for bringing them to the surface of the ground in the day time. They rest during the day underground. So just water the soil in which the slugs are supposed to be. How are you to know where they are? They are like to hide near the plants they are feeding on. So water the ground with some nice clean lime water. This will disturb them, and they'll pop up to see what the matter is.

Beside these most common of pests, pests which attack many kinds of plants, there are special pests for special plants. Discouraging, is it not? Beans have pests of their own; so have potatoes and cabbages. In fact, the vegetable garden has many inhabitants. In the flower garden lice are very bothersome, the cutworm and the slug have a good time there, too, and ants often get very numerous as the season advances. But for real discouraging insect troubles the vegetable garden takes the prize. If we were going into fruit to any extent, perhaps the vegetable garden would have to resign in favor of the fruit garden. As much as these pests like vegetables, they tend to like the sweetness of fruit even
better. This makes growing fruit without pesticides a difficult task.

A common pest in the vegetable garden is the tomato worm that likes eating into the ripe fruit. This is a large yellowish or greenish striped worm. A great, light green caterpillar is found on celery. This caterpillar may be identified by the black bands, one on each ring or segment of its body. The squash bug may be told by its brown body, which is long and slender, and by the disagreeable smell from it when killed. The potato bug is another critter to look out for. It is a beetle with yellow and black stripes down its crusty back. The little green cabbage worm is a complete pain in the neck or garden that is. It is a small caterpillar and smaller than the tomato worm. These are perhaps the most common of garden pests by name.