Hello everyone, welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast.

Today we are joined again by Susan Mulvill, master gardener from Spokane, Washington.

Her upcoming book, The Vegetable Garden Pest Handbook, is out on April 6th, 2021.

So make sure you either order pre-order that.

Okay, Susan, we talked yesterday about some cultural practices to reduce insect problems.

A lot of that was sort of hinging on growing extremely healthy plants and not making some

sort of key mistakes to allow insects to get into the garden that will start munching away.

Of course, you can't perfectly eliminate that and as you mentioned in episode one, you

need pests because you want beneficials in the garden to help do some of that work for

you.

Yes, the first question would be, what's like the general framework you would use to get

some beneficials in the garden if you don't have any right now or you have minimal amounts?

Okay, well, I have a lot of different ideas.

Certainly, planting a wide variety of flowers to provide nectar and pollen is important

because certain stages in the life of a beneficial insect involve either nectar and or pollen.

And so that would be good and you don't want a monoculture.

You want all different kinds of flowers because all of these different beneficial insects

have different types of mouth parts and so you want to accommodate that.

Also don't, I know we gardeners like to be a tidy bunch but don't tidy up the leaves

underneath shrubs and other plants because that will give the good bugs a place to over

winter.

So that is huge.

...