Ladybug, ladybug, stay close to home: ladybugs would be good pest control - if you could keep them around - Answering Machine

Vegetarian Times, July, 1997 by Lee Reilly, Ed Blonz

Several years ago, I bought a pint of ladybugs for $16 and released them in my garden. At mid-day, some of them were still there, exploring my tomatoes, which were also being explored by aphids, but by about 4 p.m., most of the ladybugs were next door. By mid-week, there wasn't a ladybug within 100 yards of my tomatoes or my aphids, and I resorted to a homemade organic spray. It proved too little too late.

What went wrong? One problem was my technique, according to Janet Taylor, co-author of Dead Snails Leave No Trails: Natural Pest Control for Home and Garden (Ter Speed Press, 1996). An entomologist and former zookeeper, Taylor recommends releasing ladybugs at night right on the problem area. At night, they'll stay close, and in the morning, when they're hungry, they'll munch on the aphids you've provided them. Nonetheless, she says, "You will still lose at least 50 percent of your lady beetles to other yards."

But even following this technique, I probably wouldn't have kept half of my ladybugs. The reason: I had enough soft-bodied insects to destroy my tomato crop, but not enough to keep even one commercial ladybug happy. "The ladybugs you buy are adults," explains Sara Stein, author of Planting Noah's Garden: Further Adventures in Backyard Ecology (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), "and they're not that hungry. The larvae are the ones that really eat. So the ladybug is looking for a place for her larvae. She needs a lot of different aphids, which means a lot of different plants, and she needs a really good infestation."

Stein, a science writer, is against artificially introducing ladybugs as bio-pest control into home gardens, because such an approach introduces one more imbalance into an ecosystem already askew. For several years, she has not used pest controls of any type on her healthy, nationally acclaimed five-acre garden in suburban New York state. Instead, she has followed a long-term strategy to rebuild the land's original ecology, an ecology where aphids, preying mantises, ladybugs, bluebirds and humans all have enough to eat. The strategy caused a radical change in topography: Once a typical suburban setting with green lawns and border flowers, Stein's yard now has wild oak woods, wetland and gardens, and she insists that the average American yard can sustain just this sort of diversity, even when it's a fraction of an acre snuggled in a tract development.

One tenet of her strategy is interplanting, which should, over time, attract ladybugs and other predators naturally. "I would suggest to anybody to interplant their vegetables with strips of meadow: coneflowers, blazing stars, Black-eyed Susans," Stein says, "or surround the garden with a meadow border." Different plants attract different insects, and predators need a series of insects over time -- Stein calls them "crops" of insects -- to survive. Interplanting will also camouflage the scene, discouraging damaging insects from settling into, say, the cabbage neighborhood and completely devouring it. "We have an aesthetic of what an orderly garden looks like," she says, "and it's awfully appealing to insects."

In addition, Stein recommends trying to attract birds, which are predators of insects too. She places bird houses in her garden, and she keeps fruit trees. "We deadhead our flowers and then wonder why we're not having birds migrating through in the fall," she notes. By letting flowers drop seeds, she attracts birds to her garden. In addition to being considerably more interesting than her neighbors' gardens, Stein swears that her ecological garden is low maintenance and nearly weed-free.

But will an eco-friendly garden frighten the neighbors? Not at all, Stein promises. "It looks very nice," she says. "People think it's going to look like an unkempt roadside, but it doesn't."