With constant calls on various pests in the garden—grasshoppers, earwigs and other plagues of nature—gardening can be a downer. I’ve been trying to look at the positive insect life in the garden to keep me from dousing it all with Sevin.

The good thing is the same pests aren’t everywhere. Granted, the earwigs completely devoured my eldest son’s popcorn. When I peeled back the husk it looked like a horror movie with earwigs spilling out everywhere. Yesterday I was spritzing them with insecticidal soap and delighting in watching them fall to the ground. Yes, I left my heart in the kitchen so I can take care of these little meanies without remorse or regret.

It’s the same with the grasshoppers. I spritz them and whack them as often as I can. It’s not working, so next year I’m already planning to set drip hoses along all of the plants and cover everything throughout the season. It wont stop them, but hopefully it’ll keep out the lazy ones.

Beneficial Insects

But, like I said, I want to focus on the positive. I have a plot at one of the community gardens where I grow the sweet corn, plus the bulk of the tomatoes and beans. It’s a challenging spot because of the copious amount of bindweed, but I must say Ive never seen so many ladybugs. It looked like someone released thousands of them.

Needless to say, we had absolutely no issues with aphids. I’m not exactly certain why the healthy population, except for the fact that there are a lot of wild plants such as yellow clover and a whole mess of others. Benign neglect is good for the beneficial bugs.

The other gleam of hope I’ve seen are the incredible number of bumble bees. I’m not familiar with all of the various species, but I’m working on figuring out how to determine which is which (its not quite as easy as you might think). We didnt have as many honey bees around (we move our hives down on alfalfa fields for maximum honey production), but the bumbles did a fine job of pollination.

Bees!

The benefits of bumble bees over the non-native European honey bees is they are out early in the spring, work when its cold and cant be beat when it comes to the buzz pollination of tomatoes and other Solanacea crops. Buzz pollination is when the bumble bee grasps the flower and vibrates to the tune of middle C in order to release the pollen. Although other bees will pollinate these same flowers, the bumble bees do it the best.

Since there are concerns about bumble bees in many parts of the country, it was good to see so many in the garden. The Xerces Society (www.xerces.org) has excellent resources on identifying bumble bees, as well as explaining the status of particular species of concern such as the Western bumble bee, Franklin, rusty patched and yellowbanded bumble bees. Many of the ones I saw loitered around the sunflowers, but they were also all over the raspberries and by the abundance of tomatoes Im certain theyre responsible for the phenomenal pollination.

So even though there were certain aspects of the garden that were frustrating when it came to insects doing damage in the garden this year, but its best to look at the glimmers of hope and simply make plans to be better prepared against the pests that look to take advantage of a productive season.