by CE Wynn

Created on: February 19, 2010   Last Updated: August 01, 2010

There is nothing more disappointing to look out onto a newly planted veggie garden, the next morning to find that bugs have eaten everything in sight before the plants have even had a good chance of having a full days worth of sun. There are means and ways of ensuring that bugs do not destroy your garden, none which require spraying nasty chemicals to control their numbers.

* Good vs Bad

Let's begin by getting one thing straight, not all bugs are bad. A large proportion of the bug life in the veggie garden is beneficial, and it's not recommended to kill them off.  Beneficial bugs, include lady beetles, parasitic wasps, stick insects such as Praying Mantis, and hoverflies, just to name a few.

Beneficial bugs in some way or another kill the bad bugs. For instance, parasitic wasps are from among other things a natural enemy to aphids. Rather then eating them, the wasps actually inject there larva into them. By the time the larva hatch, the aphid has died, and the cycle continues with the new larva injecting more aphids.

Like a lot of things, bad bugs are really not bad, until they become out of control and start causing problems.  Common bugs that you don't want to have in large numbers include aphids, snails, slugs, and slaters. . An example would be the slater or pillbug, which usually eats decaying matter, and is an important part of the composting process. However, from personal experience it appears using a fine woody mulch, increases there numbers dramatically, and rather then just eating decaying matter, they start on lovely young seedlings, destroying them overnight.

* Encouraging Beneficial Bugs

To be able to control the bad bugs, its necessary to encourage enough beneficial bugs into the garden to ensure they keep the population of the bad bugs down. The aim is not to eradicate the bad bugs but control there numbers so there is enough for the beneficial bugs and other natural predictors to survive on.

As mentioned earlier, not all beneficial bugs actually eat the bad bugs. Instead, the food source of most of these bugs are flowers. So rather then growing all vegetables, also include flowers and herbs to attract and encourage beneficial bugs into the garden. A great example is planting Alyssum a delightful little flowering ground cover. Not only does it act similar to mulch by protecting the soil from fluctuating temperatures and water evaluation, it also encourages hoverflies, which love a range of problem bugs including aphids, mites

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