Category Archives: Critters

Apr 23 0 comments
Critters

Ladybugs!

Every year around this time, we release ladybugs.  This year, we were having a hard time finding them.  Everywhere we went had just sold out. But we finally found some at the Elliot’s Hardware booth at the Living Green Expo in Plano.  I really could have used them a few weeks earlier, but hopefully my roses will forgive me.  The primary food source of ladybugs is aphids.

Ladybugs are one of the best beneficial insects you can have in your garden.  You should definitely encourage them – or even buy some and release them.  If you release some and they all disappear, you have either been using pesticides or you have such a wonderfully organic garden that they have gone else where for food.  The birds won’t eat them because the have a chemical that makes them taste bad.  That happens a lot with orange or red insects.

Did you know that a female ladybug will lay more that 1000 eggs in her lifetime?  And those eggs will eventually become the ‘aphid lion,’ which is the larval stage of the ladybug.  The aphid lion has an even more voracious appetite than the adult ladybug!  For more fun facts about ladybugs, you can check at The Ladybug Kid.

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Apr 20 1 comments
Critters, Trowel and Error

Texas Butterfly Gardening

What fun is gardening without butterflies? But to get an abundance of butterflies to come to your yard, you have to have the plants that they want and need – host plants and nectar plants.

Host plants are the plants that butterflies will lay their eggs on and then the hungry caterpillars will eat.  Nectar plants are just that – plants that provide nectar as food for the adult butterflies.   Some butterflies become very specific in the plants they need, especially for host plants.  Monarchs need milkweeds, the Gulf Fritillary needs passionflower, and the Hackberry Butterfly needs hackberries.

Here are some host plants that are very specific for some Texas butterflies:

Monarch Caterpillar

Monarch Caterpillar

  • Milkweed (Monarch)
  • Passionflower Vine (Gulf Fritillary)
  • Hackberry (Hackberry butterfly)
  • Sunflower (Patch Butterfly)
  • Elm, Hackberry, nettle ( Question Mark)
  • Citrus (Giant Swallowtail)

Here are some other great host and nectar plants that grow well in Texas :

  • Asters – blooms late summer to fall
  • Bee Balm (Bergamot) – blooms summer through fall
  • Butterfly Bush (Buddleia) – blooms midsummer through fall
  • Carrot – early spring or late fall
  • Clover – blooms spring to fall
  • Coreopsis – blooms summer to fall
  • Cosmos – blooms summer to fall
  • Dianthus – blooms spring to fall
  • Dill – spring to fall
  • Fennel – summer to fall
  • Hollyhocks – blooms summer
  • Impatiens – summer to fall
  • Lavender – blooms spring to fall
  • Lupine (including blue bonnets) – blooms spring
  • Marigold – summer to fall

    Monarch Chrysalis

    Monarch Chrysalis

  • Mints – spring to fall
  • Nasturtium – early spring and late fall
  • Parsley – spring to fall
  • Phlox – blooms late spring to fall
  • Purple Coneflower (Echinacea) – blooms summer to fall
  • Sage – blooms spring to fall
  • Salvia – blooms late spring to fall
  • Shasta Daisy – blooms late spring to fall
  • Thistle – blooms spring to fall
  • Yarrow – blooms late spring to fall
  • Zinnia – blooms summer to fall

Basically, almost anything with a bloom can become a nectar plant including the dreaded dandelion.

Sam with a Monarch

Sam with a Monarch

For a list of butterflies of Texas, you can try The Butterfly Site and for an even more specific list for the DFW Metroplex you can try the Dallas Lepidoptera Society’s site.  I also saw that the Texas  Discovery Gardens will be hosting a “Butterfly Gardening Workshop” on Thursday, April 30.  It costs $60 ($50 for members) but it looks like you get a lot for the cost of registration.

Other great resources are Gardens with Wings and Monarch Watch.

May the wings of the butterfly kiss the sun
And find your shoulder to light on,
To bring you luck, happiness and riches
Today, tomorrow and beyond.
~Irish Blessing

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Apr 19 0 comments
Critters

Dragonflies

Red Dragonfly

I love dragonflies.  I once saw one take down a fly that was almost as big as it was.  I love watching them.  They are like little helicopters in their movements.

This one was a regular in our back yard a couple of years ago.  As near as I can tell, it is some sort of skimmer – red skimmer, flame skimmer, neon skimmer.  If there are any entomologists here, please help me to identify him.  We get lots of little green and blue damselflies, but this is the one and only large red dragonfly we have had in our backyard.  I’m hoping one will return this year.

Did you know that fossil records show that dragonflies have been around since prehistoric times?  But back then they were huge!  Much bigger than this guy.  Here are a few more fun facts about dragonflies.

  • Dragonfly eyes contain up to 30,000 individual lenses.
  • They have two sets of wings. They don’t have to beat their wings in unison like other insects do. Their front wings can be going up while their backs ones are going down.
  • Dragonfly nymphs (the first stage after hatching) live in the water for about a year.
  • While underwater they eat mosquito nymphs, tiny fish, and pollywogs. When they have matured to airborne insects, they catch mosquitoes and gnats in mid-air before devouring them.
  • After leaving the water and becoming flying insects, they only live for about a month.
  • Their natural predators are birds.

Dragonflies are definitely worth encouraging in your garden!  The biggest thing you can do to encourage dragonflies to your yard is to stop using pesticides.  Stop poisoning them and their food and let them help you out with the pests in your garden.  They will be much more specific in their bug killing efforts than any pesticide ever could.

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Apr 17 0 comments
Critters, Trowel and Error

To Dig Or Not To Dig

A friend, Julie,  asked to borrow a tiller the other day in order to till up part of her yard for a garden.  I don’t till.  I do have an antique tiller that worked quite well for my mother, but I’m too lazy (and environmentally conservative) to till.  I don’t want to hurt my earthworms, who are prized friends in my garden.

I have another friend who swears by a system called double digging.  If you want to know how to do that, you can find out here, but it is more work than I even want to think about.

Julie wrote back to me saying that she had thought about the worm aspect, but that her yard was hard clay with nothing growing in it for years.  She did some research and came back with a brilliant plan that I had not heard of before.  Her plan was to try naturally softening the top using rabbit food -alfalfa- on top of the dirt, cover with mulch such as straw, then top with a thin layer of organic substance (compost or hummus) and plant into it some native wild plants.  The reasoning was that the rabbit food would attract worms to the surface to aerate the soil. while the mulch slowly decomposed releasing the good stuff into the top layer of soil.  The plants-such as sunflowers, further aerate the oil and begin creating a symbiosis in the soil making it friendly to future planting.  I love the idea!

Now, here are five reasons not to dig..

Now THATS an earthworm

Now THAT'S an earthworm

  1. Not digging encourages the worms to do the work for you.
  2. Not digging reduces the loss of moisture (very important in Texas).
  3. Not digging protects the soil structure (think erosion)
  4. Not digging prevents weed seed from being brought to the surface to germinate
  5. Not digging is easier on the back.

And here are five reason you may want to go ahead and dig anyway…

  1. Digging breaks up heavily compacted soils and allows air back in to it.
  2. Digging kills surface weeds (although maybe not as well as suffocating them with cardboard).
  3. Digging exposes pests to predators and and temperature changes.
  4. Digging loosens things up for root vegetables to thrive.
  5. Digging is good exercise for those who want it (or are physically able).

Here are a few quick earthworm facts:

  • Worms live where there is food, moisture, oxygen and a favorable temperature. If they don’t have these things, they go somewhere else.
  • There are approximately 2,700 different kinds of earthworms.
  • In one acre of land, there can be more than a million earthworms.
  • The largest earthworm ever found was in South Africa and measured 22 feet from its nose to the tip of its tail.
  • Worms tunnel deeply in the soil and bring subsoil closer to the surface mixing it with the topsoil. Slime, a secretion of earthworms, contains nitrogen. Nitrogen is an important nutrient for plants. The sticky slime helps to hold clusters of soil particles together in formations called aggregates.
  • Baby worms are not born. They hatch from cocoons smaller than a grain of rice.
  • Worms can eat their weight each day.
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Apr 11 0 comments
Critters, Organic Garden Solutions

The Thrashing of Thrips

Traviata Rose

Traviata Rose

Every year I have a small problem with thrips.  It seems like they emerge a couple of weeks before their predators do.

Thrips are those tiny little vampire gnat-like things that suck the blood out of your roses and make thier poor little heads droop.  You can’t see them without a magnifying glass, but you know them by the damage they leave behind.

I usually just wait until the beneficial green lacewings (a very good bug!) catch up and eat them up.  That way, I don’t have to go and buy green lacewings – they just come because they know that they have a chemical-free buffet waiting for them in my yard.

If it’s just driving me crazy or I’m feeling overly industrious, I will spray with garlic-pepper tea.  Here is the recipe and it usually makes enough to last for more an entire season:

Garlic-Pepper Tea

Put a couple of hot peppers (habanero, jalapeno, cayenne, etc.) and a couple of cloves of garlic in a blender with a couple of cups of water and liquefy.

Pour the mixture through a strainer and pour into a gallon jug (I like the big glass apple jugs becuase I have had plastic milk jugs develop holes and leak)Add enough water to fill the jug.

Shake before using and add 1/4 cup of the mixture to a gallon of water in a large sprayer (or another jug to fill a small spray bottle).

Be careful with this concoction.  It is lethal to more than just thips!  It will also kill ladybug and green lacewings.  Only use it when you really feel you have to.

Another thing you can do to deal with thrips are buy some green lacewings to release.  I saw some in my garden yesterday.  They are tiny, but really cool.

You could also spray with tobacco tea (cigarette butts with filters removed that have been soaking in a gallon of water for 24 hours thinned to a pale tea color) but I don’t smoke and rarely have cigarette butts laying around.  Tobacco is another indiscriminate killer so use it with caution.  Your ladybugs will thank you.

As a repellent, you can spray your roses with seaweed.  That is has a bonus effect since the seaweed repels the thrips and also acts as a foliar feed for you plant.

So… please leave the Sevin, Dursban and Malathion to Bayer, Dow Chemical and Southern Agriculture.  All three of these chemicals have shown to have health effects to humans and they have not eradicated a single pest, but they have created “super bugs” that have developed resistance.  There – that’s my plea.

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