If you’re not so wild about the aphids that are busily sucking the juices out of your lettuce, then you might want to invite some ladybugs to your garden. These pretty beetles eat up the aphids that eat your plants.
Before ladybug babies even become adults, they can eat 400 aphids. As adults, they munch on up to 5000 of the little critters. That’s 5000 fewer aphids in your garden, and that’s only from one ladybug! Of course, they don’t only eat aphids. They also eat potato beetles, mealybugs, and spider mites, among other things.
How can you attract ladybugs to your garden?
Well, you can release them. Garden centers often have ladybugs for sale. Check stores for native species of ladybugs, and plan your release for an afternoon, so the ladybugs will settle down in your garden for the evening. This will encourage them to stick around. If you don’t have many aphids in your garden, then don’t think that the ladybugs will stay. They need to eat just like we do, and they’ll move on to more aphid-infested pastures if you don’t have enough aphids in your garden. So you want aphids – just enough to keep the ladybugs hanging out in your garden.
If you want to attract ladybugs instead of buying them, planting ladybug plants is the way to do it. Ladybug plants include fennel, dill, cilantro, caraway, angelica, tansy, wild carrot and yarrow. Even those dandelions in your lawn attract ladybugs! To encourage happy ladybugs, eliminate your use of pesticides as well, since ladybugs are insects and will be damaged by pesticides. To keep ladybugs in your garden safe over the winter, make sure that you have plenty of fallen plant materials and old rockery areas where they can take shelter.
Is your garden crawling with these little beetles?
Image Credit: Stock Exchange