In the Garden: November

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Chances are you’ve had spiders on your mind lately. In October and November, it feels like there are spiders everywhere. Not the black plastic Halloween spiders with their gauzy white webs, but big fat real live spiders in a multitude of sizes and colors.

In October, there was a fresh obstacle course of invisible spider webs in my yard each and every day, rain or shine. Spiders apparently build their webs at the exact height of my head, with a preference for my mouth and eyes and hair. Because of spider webs, I dropped packages, potted plants and coffee cups navigating between the house, the mailbox and the garden. There was no safe path from point A to B. Not in my yard, and probably not in yours.

My arms grew tired from flailing about, and my husband grew weary from rushing outdoors to see why I shrieked. We collected garden stakes and hearty twigs and put them on the porch, in the garden, and even in my car, to ensure our safe passage through the wild kingdom.

Here’s why we’re seeing so many orb weaver spiders right now: It’s their mating season. Spiders have been busy stashing their egg sacs under the eaves and throughout the garden. When the frost arrives, the adult spiders will die, with the hope their eggs will hatch in the spring.

Not all spiders build webs and wait for dinner to arrive. Many spiders are hunters and actively stalk their prey. Some spiders live on plants, flowers, and trees. Others live on the debris beneath plants or in piles of wood, and some live beneath the ground. However, it is the ones who build webs are the ones we’re most familiar with and that we see when going about our lives.

I welcome spiders in my garden, and you should too. Although most spiders are venomous, very few have fangs that can penetrate human skin and therefore aren’t considered “medically significant.” Spiders are a very important species in our yards and gardens. They are voracious eaters of a wide variety of garden pests, including aphids, caterpillars, wasps, grasshoppers, thrips, beetles, cutworms and mealybugs.

In addition to spiders, there are a multitude of other beneficial insects, bugs and creepy crawly critters that eat the pests in our yards. Often, these beneficial good guys are mis-identified as pests themselves. To add confusion, many familiar garden species (for example, the beetle family) contain good guys and bad guys, and we don’t know which are which. We need to learn more about them – what they look like and what they eat – to help us know the good guys from the bad guys, and to understand what part they play in the health of our gardens.

The bad guys (pests) are the leaf sucking and plant eating bugs that damage our plants, including aphids, leafhoppers, mites, thrips, whiteflies, grasshoppers, and some species of caterpillars and beetles. These bad guys are an important food source for the beneficial good guy bugs, as well as for birds, bats and snakes. They also assist with pollination while visiting plants and flowers, and they help with diversity by moving seeds and pollen from one spot to another. We don’t have to fully eliminate the bad guys, but we do want to control them and their damage in ways that don’t damage the ecosystem.

The good guys (beneficials) provide free pest control in our home gardens, helping to balance the population of bad guys. Here are some of the desirable good guys, with info about which bad guys they eat:

Ladybugs

Ladybugs are among the most voracious predators in the garden. Everyone loves the cute spotted adults, but it’s their developing larva that that benefit our gardens. The larvae look like tiny alligators with orange spots, and they can eat hundreds of aphids per day. They also eat mites, scale, thrips, mealybugs, leafhoppers, and insect eggs. To attract ladybugs to your garden, plant nasturtiums, which act as trap plants and draw aphids away from other plants. Don’t purchase live ladybugs for your garden, as they typically fly away or die when you release them.

Ants

Ants eat aphids, mites, thrips, millipedes and centipedes, whiteflies, leafhoppers, and insect eggs. Ants also help create healthy soil.

Hoverflies and Green Lacewings

Both species eat flower nectar, and their offspring – like ladybugs – are voracious aphid eaters. Never spray an infestation of aphids, as you may wash away the eggs or larva of hoverflies, who are far more effective than pesticides at controlling aphids.

Braconid Parasitic Wasps

These very tiny wasps inject their eggs into aphids, caterpillars, beetles, moths, and more. The egg hatches inside the host, who then dies.

Dragonfly

These eat mosquitoes, gnats, flies and swarming termites.

Ground Beetles

Ground beetles live beneath rocks and piles of debris. They consume a wide variety of insects, including slugs.

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