Community Eco-Gardens by Dennis Swiftdeer Paige;

Author:Dennis Swiftdeer Paige;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Published: 2020-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Once stretching throughout the grandeur of moist, tall grass prairies, Filipendula rubra or Queen of the Prairie is truly a magnificent, regal plant from the rose family spreading with rhizomes up and down a full sun section of the swale. Japanese beetles can devour these cotton candy-looking fluffy gems within a few days if unchecked.

A giant golden digger wasp (Sphex ichneumoneus), besides being an outstanding pollinator of native plants, favors this candy cane fragrant mountain mint and is also a voracious beneficial predatory feeder of grasshoppers, katydids, crickets and Japanese beetles. Living and nesting underground, females will drag their paralyzed prey across the ground with its antennas to a tunnel at a nesting chamber where she lays eggs on top of it. She closes the chamber behind her and never returns.

I could not keep up with the inordinate population that year and saw many lovely plants sacrificed because of an attractive foundation based on lawns. My hope was to continue to move full speed ahead from lawn breeding grounds to native habitats. Unfortunately, I was desperate that year, thinking maybe I could catch them with Japanese beetle traps, but all these pheromone attractive devices did was invite the surrounding neighbors’ Japanese beetles to come too, creating an exponential problem where they were spreading their devouring tsunami appetite all over the property. That was probably the worst season of infestation and would have been completely disastrous had not the heroes of this shock wave arrived. When the season wound down I had a chance to look into the bluebird box where four house wrens were born. The nest was still intact and I began to decipher what remains were left from their seasonal fed diet. Scores of Japanese beetle carcasses were found throughout the inner nest cavity. Amazingly they turned out to be voracious beetle eaters. I always considered the house wrens from that moment on to be a true guardian of native plants.

Now there is an ongoing plan to introduce beneficial nematodes. Though they are harmless to humans, animals, plants, and healthy earthworms, beneficial nematodes aggressively pursue insects. The beneficial nematodes can be used to control a broad range of soil inhabiting insects and above ground insects in their soil inhabiting stage of life. More than 200 species of pest insects from 100 insect families are susceptible to these nematodes. When they sense the temperature and carbon dioxide emissions of ­soil-borne insects, beneficial nematodes move toward their prey and enter the pest through its body openings. The nematodes carry an associated bacterium (Xenorhabdus species) that kills insects fast within 48 hours. The bacteria is harmless to humans and other organisms and cannot live freely in nature. Several generations of nematodes may live and breed within the dead insect, feeding on it as a food source. When the food source is gone, they migrate into the soil in search of a new host. When the pest population is eliminated, the beneficial nematodes die off and biodegrade. Beneficial nematodes are so effective,

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