How to Use Nature's Helpers in Your Vegetable Garden

Learn how to take advantage of beneficial birds, bugs and toads and have them get rid of pests in your garden. These practical hints are from the 1894 book, How to Make the Garden Pay.

Gardener and Birds

First of all, save and protect: the birds. Almost all of them are insect-eaters, and many among them, even English sparrows, are at one time or other helping to clear the farmer's fields and gardens of insects. The young of the English sparrow are raised almost entirely on insect food. So are the young of robin "Redbreast." Grown birds feast on grasshoppers, cicadas, May-beetles, etc., whenever they have a chance, preferring this diet to other food. Crows, owls, and many hawks usually do us more good than harm. Quails, like crows, are great grub-eaters. They need protection, not persecution.

Learn to know your friends among insects. The common lady bug lives largely on plant lice, eggs of potato bugs, etc. The ferocious ground beetle hunts and devours canker worms, army worms, and especially cut worms. Four-winged dragon flies feed upon mosquitoes, etc. The soldier bug and the grand lebia seem to consider the potato bug larva a dainty dish, and destroy great numbers of them. Species of spider, known familiarly as "granddaddy-long-legs," also make themselves useful by feasting on noxious insects. Blister beetles serve to prevent excessive multiplication of grasshoppers, etc. All these useful insects deserve protection.

Don't kill the toad. Its value as an insect-eater is more generally recognized in England and France than here, for the homely animal has become a regular article of trade in the markets of London and Paris. The demand for the article by English gardeners, in fact, exceeds the home supply, and dealers have begun to look to this country for additional stock. In small gardens we might often employ toads as guards around hills of choice melons, squashes, etc., by providing them with a suitable guard house or hiding place, under a piece of board, a stone, or some rubbish right among the plants. Place one or more specimens in a hotbed or cold frame, and see the insects disappear. Every crawling thing that comes within sight and reach of the toad, may its smell be ever so disgusting, its flavor ever so rank, its shell ever so hard, falls a prey to the toad's voracious appetite. The toad seems to be always ready for business.

This is part of an article from the book The Kitchen Garden Guide