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| Photo Credit: Sarah Landicho |
| Mosquitos can be quite the nuisance just when you're trying to relax! |
We’ve all been frustrated one time or another by the destruction caused by a garden pest. Maybe it’s the Japanese beetle eating your beautiful rose blooms or chewing on your green beans. Or maybe it’s just a pesky mosquito making your relaxing afternoon in the hammock impossible. If you’re not interested in using sprays to get rid of these garden nuisances, no problem: There are ways to keep these insects away naturally without using chemicals. Here are a few simple ideas to get you started with some basics.
Peonies and the Tiphia WaspPeonies are a beautiful spring-blooming perennial that produce some of the largest and intensely fragrant flowers. (There’s one cultivar called ‘Dinner Plate’ – you can imagine its size!) These beautiful flowers attract a beneficial insect called the Tiphia wasp, which eats the larvae of Japanese beetles (a pest that can wreak havoc on summer blooms). We usually refer to Japanese beetle larvae as grubs. These grubs are found underground, busily munching on grass roots until they become adults and begin to munch on everything aboveground. Tiphia wasps love peony nectar. So if you plant these beautiful perennials around your garden, you can create a feeding ground for the wasps to help destroy your Japanese beetle populations. (Another spring-blooming plant enjoyed by Tiphia wasps is the forsythia.)
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