The operations for destroying insects, or counteracting their injurious effects, are our next consideration. These are so numerous that, were we to enumerate all that have been recommended by writers on agriculture and gardening, it would excite astonishment that all the races of injurious insects had not been exterminated long ago, or, at least, that any should appear in such an undue proportion, as to baffle our own immediate efforts to subdue them.
—JANE LOUDON,
Loudon’s Encyclopadia of Gardening, 1830
When I started gardening, I had no idea that I would get so intimate with the lives of bugs. I paged through the full-color gardening books at the bookstore and I never saw a single bug in any of those gardens. Insects didn’t seem to be a particularly desirable thing to have. None of my favorite gardening magazines ever had a garden on the cover that was swarming with bugs. And I never heard anyone praise a garden by saying, “You won’t believe all the bugs she’s got out there! It’s spectacular!” A garden, it seemed, should be neat and clean and free of insects of all kinds.
But this was never the case in my garden. After that first infestation of aphids and scale on the orange tree, I started paying more attention to the bug population in my backyard. I did a little reading, too, and found out that organic gardeners divide the insect world into two camps: good bugs and bad bugs. The bad bugs bring death and disease and destruction to the garden, sucking the life out of crops, infesting the soil, and laying eggs by the thousands. The good bugs swarm in like handsome, broad-shouldered NATO peacekeepers, bringing peace and justice and harmony. They watch over the crops, and while you’re not looking, so as not to frighten or disturb you, they munch discreetly on the bad bugs.
One of the first things I noticed was that the good bugs were all prettier than the bad bugs. Or at least the photos in my organic gardening books made it look that way. The good bugs, the hover flies and the ladybugs and the honeybees, were always photographed in the center of a bright pink dahlia or a sunny yellow zinnia. They all had adorable stripes or dots or elegant, lacy wings. They looked like the sort of bugs you’d want to have in your garden. They were friendly and cheerful and not at all creepy.
The photos of bad bugs, on the other hand, made my skin crawl. Whiteflies swarmed over the underside of a tomato leaf. The squash vine borer larvae, a sickly white grub, chewed through a tough old squash vine. Armored scale rose along the bark of a tree like pimples, swollen and faintly purplish. Even the Mexican bean beetle, which looks almost identical to a ladybug except that it is copper colored instead of red, was photographed in a dim, greenish light that made it look vile and corrupt.
The good bugs also got better names, some fierce and warlike, others graceful and feminine. Who wouldn’t want a spined soldier bug, a robber fly, or a minute pirate bug on your side? Or a ferocious tiger beetle, or an ant lion? And some of them sounded so lovable: damsel flies, lacewings, lady beetles. The bad bugs, on the other hand, all had names that sounded like the kind of things little kids would call each other on the playground: cabbage maggot, cankerworm, stink bug. The lines were drawn, and they were fixed and firm. The insect guides were as reassuring as fairy tales, where the good guys are distinguished sharply from the bad guys, and good always triumphs over evil.
But out in my garden, nothing was ever that clear-cut. For one thing, I had trouble telling the good bugs from the bad, and I wasn’t sure what I would do about it if I could. To tell the difference between a tachinid fly, the good bug, and a housefly, the bad bug, I had to look for large bristles on the fly’s abdomen. A ground beetle, which eats slugs, is distinguished from a darkling beetle, which eats plants, by a ridge on the head from which the ground beetle’s antennae protrude. I couldn’t get close enough to these bugs to see them well, and they rarely sat still long enough for me to run inside, find my book so I could look them up, and come back outside to look for their ridges or bristles.
It was probably best not to interfere in this intricate war between the bugs anyway. It was a civil war, and I was a third party, large and powerful, but unfamiliar with the history and customs of the natives. Once, I wiped out an entire cache of yellow eggs on the underside of an aphid-infested artichoke leaf, convinced that I was doing a good thing by destroying the young of the evil Mexican bean beetle. Instead, I realized later, I had taken out a nursery of ladybug eggs that would have eventually hatched into hungry, aphid-eating larvae and saved my artichokes from destruction. I felt terrible about it. For weeks afterward, I apologized to every ladybug I saw.
I decided to take on a slightly different role after that, more like the Red Cross, providing food and medical supplies, but otherwise staying out of the way. I planted yarrow and mint, chamomile and thyme, plants that offer up plenty of pollen and nectar. I scattered seeds of cosmos and goldenrod and calendula, and it all came up, blooming in a careless, mismatched sort of way, carpeting the space between the vegetable beds and the flower borders like a wildflower meadow. These flowers, the books promised me, would attract all the very best bugs, the most worthy and desirable of insects, who would stop by for a snack and enjoy the neighborhood so much that they would decide to settle down and raise a family. Peace would reign in the little village that was my backyard.
THINGS DIDN’T WORK out that way, at least not at first. The warm June weather was starting to create some serious aphid problems in my backyard. They swarmed over my half-grown tomato plants and even nestled down between the leaves of each artichoke. This made harvesting artichokes tricky: The only way I could clean them was to submerge them in a sinkful of water for a half an hour and let the bugs slowly float to the surface. Then I took them out of the sink and boiled them, and a few more bugs floated away. It was a rather gruesome task to go through for a few artichokes.
I flipped through my gardening books at night, trying to figure out what to do. There was so much to know. Ladybugs eat aphids, but they are migratory. Like the tourists, they only come for the summer. Aphids hang around during the winter, clinging to woody stems or crevices in bark. Figuring out how these bugs relate to each other in the garden, the books told me, is the key to keeping pests in check.
I was amazed at the crop reports on the university farm’s Web site explaining their attempts at pest management. “We’re trying to do something about earworms in the corn,” I read one time. “We’ve planted rows of goldenrod in the cornfield. We hope this will attract minute pirate bugs, a natural predator to the earworm larvae.” Such work to get rid of some earworms! What if the goldenrod doesn’t come up? What if the minute pirate bugs aren’t drawn to it? What if they show up but don’t find the earworm larvae until it’s too late?
If I really wanted to get rid of the aphids, there was that one other option, the one that was always just lurking in the background: Pesticide. The bomb. San Lorenzo devoted an entire aisle to products that got rid of bugs, and I hadn’t forgotten what a thorough job they’d done on my citrus tree. But I remembered how guilty and uneasy I felt after I sprayed that tree. I must have killed as many good bugs as bad. It seemed senseless and terrible, and I often regretted it. Dropping a malathion bomb on the garden is quick, easy, and final. All the bugs die at once, and the garden becomes strangely stark, silent, and insect free. But who wants to eat chemical-coated food? Why bother growing it myself if I’m just going to spray it with the same awful stuff the supermarket produce is sprayed with? I was sure I could find an organic solution, even if it meant I had to become intimate with the feeding habits, mating rituals, and habitats of every bug in the garden, good and bad.
Ladybugs were the most obvious organic solution to my aphid problem, and I had plenty of them already. I started looking for them on my evening tours of the garden. One night, I counted at least three pairs of ladybugs on my artichokes, all involved in the act of mating. The more I looked, the more I realized that there was more sex happening in my garden than in a San Francisco bathhouse. In fact, I felt a little embarrassed, like a child who’d wandered into her parent’s bedroom on Saturday morning by mistake. I felt like I shouldn’t be there. I backed away slowly, averting my eyes to give them some privacy.
I was glad the ladybugs had arrived, but I feared they were too late. The aphids were reproducing faster than the ladybugs could eat them. I thought about bringing in more from the nursery as reinforcements, but I’d heard that store-bought ladybugs tend to fly away, and besides, they might not get along with the local ladybugs who were here first. I had no idea this would be so complicated. I was running out of options.
Then one day, San Lorenzo had something different on the shelf where they usually kept the cartons of ladybugs: tall plastic bottles that looked just like juice bottles; but instead of being filled with juice, they contained sawdust and hundreds of tiny lacewing eggs. According to the directions on the package, the eggs would hatch into lacewing larvae, which would eat aphids voraciously for about three weeks. After that, they would change into “attractive egg-laying adults” and take up residence in the garden.
I was sold. I bought a bottle and took it home to release into my garden. The lacewings came with a stack of little cone-shaped paper cups, the kind they give you at the dentist’s office to rinse out your mouth. I was supposed to attach the paper cups to aphid-infested plants and trees around the yard and fill them with the sawdust/lacewing egg mixture. When the eggs hatched, the larvae would crawl out of the cups and start destroying my aphid population.
I arranged the cups around the garden, affixing some of them to the tomato supports with twist ties, nestling some into tree branches, tucking a few between the leaves and the stem of my artichoke plant. I filled each one with saw-dust and eggs, and sprinkled the rest directly onto the opening artichoke buds, where, I figured, they could hatch and begin eating immediately.
Scott came outside to check on my progress. “How do you know there are actually lacewing eggs in here?” he asked, rifling through the sawdust with a finger.
“Leave them alone!” I told him, pulling his hand away. “They’re in there. Look closer. See those tiny green eggs?”
He peered into the cup. “Oh, I see one!” he said, looking up at me triumphantly. “It looks like an aphid.”
“It is not an aphid. It is an Aphid Destroyer. Says so right here on the package.”
“Well, all these cups look pretty silly out here. Couldn’t they have given you something more natural-looking to use? Something that would blend in a little?”
I had to admit he was right there. The paper cones did look a little ridiculous clipped onto all my plants. I never saw a single lacewing larva, or an adult lacewing, in my garden after that. After a month or so, I went out and rounded up the paper cups, and there were still aphids on the tomato plants and the orange tree. I did notice, however, that my artichoke plant was completely free of aphids for weeks after that. Maybe the lacewings had done their work and moved on to another garden. Maybe, in the end, my aphids weren’t interesting enough to make them want to stay around.
APHIDS WEREN’T MY ONLY PROBLEM. The snails were starting to become a serious threat, devouring rows of lettuce in a single evening, nibbling basil down to the ground as soon as I planted it. They seemed more difficult to control than the aphids; they were larger, more substantial, and they required a direct confrontation. Spraying them hard with the hose would not make them fly away. There was no tiny predator that would come into my yard and politely devour them. I had heard that ducks ate snails, but introducing a duck into the yard would complicate things and would surely escalate the insect war to a whole new level. LeRoy would get involved, chasing the duck around, or worse, the duck would chase LeRoy. Gray would look away with haughty disdain, but she’d show her displeasure with me by refusing to sleep on my pillow at night. It could upset the balance of the entire household.
I mentioned the problem to my mother one night. I should have known she would have some good advice. “Well,” she said, “you remember that back in Texas we used bowls of beer to keep snails and slugs out of the cat food on the front porch.” She reminded me that snails (like many Texans) can’t resist beer and will crawl right into a bowl of it, oblivious to their rapidly dissolving relatives at the bottom of the bowl. “It’s sort of a redneck approach to snail control,” she said.
I did remember that. The only alternative to waking up to a bowl of cat food covered in enormous black slugs was to wake up to a bowl of stale beer filled with drowned slugs. I couldn’t face the sight and smell of it early in the morning. If that was the only way to get rid of them, the snails were safe, at least for the moment.
But I enjoyed calling around for advice. I had no idea there were so many different ways to get rid of snails. Everybody had their own method. When I called Scott’s Aunt Barbara, she said, “Oh, the salt shaker and flashlight method has always worked for me. Go outside at night when they’ve come out of hiding, and sprinkle a little salt on them. But stand back—they do foam up.” This had the same drawback as the bowl of beer—I’d have to deal with their slimy, half-dissolved bodies after I killed them. I just couldn’t face it. Besides, I was getting along pretty well with the neighbors these days. I didn’t want to alarm Charlie and Beverly by stalking through my yard late at night in my bathrobe, with a flashlight in one hand and a salt shaker in the other.
Eventually, I decided to take the advice of my gardening books, which all recommended handpicking snails. (“Handpicking,” I learned, is a gardening euphemism for systematically hunting down and killing in a quick and violent manner.) The idea was to pick them up one at a time and dispose of them somehow. A direct confrontation. No salt or beer or predators as intermediaries. It would just be woman against snail. This appealed to me.
I walked outside early in the morning and—carefully, tentatively—lifted a snail off one of my lettuce plants, grasping its shell lightly between my fingers. It came away from the plant reluctantly, and it was only after I managed to slide it along the leaf for a minute that it finally let go. I stood holding it, looking into its tiny gray face, which was rapidly retracting into its shell. Now I had to figure out what to do with it. The gardening books suggested stepping on it, but I didn’t think I could stand the crunch of its shell under my foot. I also didn’t want its slimy little corpse on my walkway afterward. I walked around the garden with it, nervous, uncertain. The snail was starting to get restless, too. It stuck one slimy antenna out of its shell, then another. I could feel its body moving around in the shell. What would a snail do if it was provoked? What kind of aggressive behavior was it about to unleash on me? A little bit of foam started bubbling out from under its shell. More out of fright than anything else, I tossed the snail into the street. In a few minutes, a car drove by and crushed it under a tire.
Aha! I didn’t have to kill them after all! I could throw them into the road and let some unsuspecting motorist do it for me! Why hadn’t the gardening books told me that in the first place?
I picked up a few more snails and tossed them into the street. Some of them looked downright nervous about it, casting their antennae about wildly, squirming around in their shells. I started talking to them as I threw them, hoping that perhaps they’d listen to reason. “Look,” I muttered to a large, tough-shelled snail, “if you’d just kept off my basil, it wouldn’t have to come to this.”
I was starting to feel like the Spaniard in The Princess Bride, engaging in a little verbal banter during the duel. I decided to try his famous line, the one he waited his whole life to say to his enemy just before he killed him. I plucked one last snail from its resting place and said loudly, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my basil. Prepare to die.” It waved its frightened gray antennae at me one last time, and I flung it into traffic.
The single best way to attract good bugs to the garden is to plant a border of herbs and flowers designed just for them. Beneficial insects prefer plants with very small flowers, and with that in mind, I usually plant a border around my vegetable garden that includes:
Dill, cilantro, and parsley: All three of these annual herbs put out sprays of small, lacy flowers. The yellow dill blossoms are particularly lovely and work well as filler in flower arrangements. They’ll attract aphid-eating thrips.
Oregano: Look for the highly ornamental Hopley’s with its dark purple flowers, great for dried flower arrangements and hard for bees to resist.
Catnip and catmint: Catnip has a more upright growing habit and pink or white flowers, while catmint, with bluish-purple flowers tends to sprawl along the ground more. It’s also a little less attractive to cats, so it’s more likely to survive in a garden inhabited by cats. Both attract plenty of pollinators.
Tansy: Related to the carrot. I planted one right next to an artichoke plant and never saw a single aphid, thanks to the ladybugs it attracted. Another artichoke, planted just a few feet away, was covered in the pests. Go figure.
Culinary sage: When left to bloom, it puts out stalks of small pink flowers that will be covered by bees. Good in dried arrangements. Cut it back when the blooms are spent and you may get a second round of flowers before the year ends.
Feverfew: An old-fashioned headache remedy, this plant has lacy foliage and small, white or yellow pom-pom flowers that attract all kinds of helpful bugs.
Queen Anne’s lace: Considered a weed in some parts of the country, but there are cultivated varieties that put out stronger blooms and look less rangy. Airy white flowers are popular among beneficial wasps and make a good filler in floral arrangements.
Yarrow: Comes in a range of pastel colors very attractive to butterflies. I’ve also seen ladybugs swarm over it.
In addition, I scatter leftover seeds from the vegetable garden, like carrot and mustard, which I know will attract good bugs when they go to seed.