Attracting Predatory Insects
The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers
Epic Gardening
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2020
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pests and pollinators are popular topics, but what about predatory insects? They cut down on pests for FREE and there are surefire ways to get more in your garden.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We talk a lot about our pollinator population in the garden, and we talk a lot about our pest population in the garden, but there are some beneficial insects that don't play a huge role as far as pollination, although they may still do a little bit of it, |
| 0:27.3 | but they play a much more important role as far as being a predatory insect for the pests that we don't want in the garden. |
| 0:34.5 | That's why on today's episode of the Epic Gardening Podcast we're going to discuss |
| 0:39.9 | how to get some of these beneficials in the garden. |
| 0:43.2 | There are a ton of what are known as parasitic wasps |
| 0:48.7 | that will go to town on things like tomato hornworms. They'll go to town on things like |
| 0:54.6 | aphids, all sorts of different things. How do we get them in the garden? Well, it |
| 1:00.0 | really has to do with the shape of a lot of the things that you've planted. |
| 1:05.0 | And when I say shape, I mean the actual shape and structure of the flower that is in the garden. |
| 1:12.0 | So if you have a large flower with a large opening, |
| 1:18.0 | a lot of things can get to that, |
| 1:19.5 | from a hummingbird all the way to your classic B. But what if you have a flower that is quite |
| 1:26.2 | small or compact or has many different heads, then something else has to pollinate |
| 1:31.2 | that. I see things like hoverflies going in on my lemon tree. |
| 1:35.2 | There's a lot of different things that are smaller than bees that still want to |
| 1:39.1 | do some pollination and gather some nectar, etc. So you want really, really tiny, tiny flowers. |
| 1:46.7 | That's a really good idea to do this. Now another thing you can do is you can just let some segment of what you plant in the garden go to Bolt. So let's perhaps say that you |
| 1:57.3 | planted a bed of dill and you have four or five dill plants. Well if you let one of those dill go to seed or at least |
| 2:05.6 | very least go to flower and bolt, well then you're gonna get quite a bit of |
| 2:10.2 | beneficials in the garden that otherwise wouldn't show up because again when it comes |
| 2:15.3 | back to the structure of that plant some of those just don't really show up in the garden and I know what |
| 2:21.1 | really seems to work well for me is if I let anything in the Nebraska family just let one or two |
... |
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