I’m really bugged…
Yes, I’m bugged, and it’s a good thing! This year, I have had a deep epiphany about how my garden works. I’ve written a bit about this, but will be coming back to this topic from different angles for as many times as I can. If I hit the right words, perhaps you will have an “aha!!” moment, too.
Ever hear comments like this?:
“I love the butterflies, and they can stay, but I’m spraying for all the caterpillars. I don’t want those…”
“What is this bug eating my tomato plant, and what kind of spray will kill it”
“Mosquitoes are bugging me. Who knows a good company who will spray for them?”
“Ewww? What can I spray to get rid of spiders?”
These are the sorts of comments that drove me away from the gardening sites. I swear, we imagine all our ills in life can be fixed by spraying something. But it can’t.
Yesterday I read an article about how the federal government is asking citizens to send them dead butterflies, moths, and other larger insects they find in their yards. The creatures will be tested for insecticides, pollution, and other poisons to try and determine why we have lost 70% of our flying insects in the past 30 years.
This is your tax dollars at work, but no study will turn the insect apocalypse around. Only we can do this, one yard or balcony at a time. But why bother, you ask? Bugs are such a bother.
Rarely do we think about what is happening at the bottom of the food chain because—well—it’s at the bottom and we are at the very top, with our heads in the clouds. The food chain is not a chain. It is a house of cards, and all across the broad, foundational bottom are insects. Destroy even a few of these hard-working, many legged species, and the entire house begins to shake. “But I don’t need bugs” you say. Please consider this: 25% of a fox’s diet is insects. Chipmunks, squirrels, possums, coyotes, and raccoons depend on insects for protein. Birds cannot raise their young without insects, and it takes many thousands to rear each clutch of fledgling birds.
In the mountains where the grizzly and black bears live, cutworm moths make up a good part of the bears’ summer diet. More than 40,000 moths can wind up in a bear’s belly each day!
The ants we poison aerate the soil and provide food for many animals. If you want to see pileated woodpeckers, you’d best learn to appreciate carpenter ants, the primary food for the nestling ‘peckers. And ants, flies, wasps, and beetles help to clean up carrion which would otherwise putrefy on forest floors and roadways. Mosquitos are food for bats, dragonflies, wasps, fish, amphibians, and birds.
And two billion of us humans eat bugs on a daily basis.
If we lose our pollinators (bees, wasps, beetles, moths, butterflies, hummingbirds, bats), 80% of our flowering plants die with them. And life as we know it is over. A simple Google query will support what I’m saying, because this information is no long fringe theory. It is mainstream and countries across the globe are sounding the alarm.
The keystone critter at the bottom of our house of cards is the caterpillar. Caterpillars feed more animals, insects, and birds than any other bug on the planet. The caterpillars poisoned by the butterfly-lover at the beginning of this article killed the next generation of her beloved butterflies. Her yard will be lonelier and less beautiful next year.
And yet the remedy to all of this environmental mess is right at the fingertips of each and every person who grows something on their property: The simple fix is knowing what plants will support the insect life we need to continue this Earthly dance.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a waste-of-skin on this earth, gobbling up space and resources and giving nothing back to life. None of us can afford do this anymore. We have obligations to life now, not just “rights.” The future truly IS in our hands.
I moved this year to a new home and new gardens that we are still planting. The keystones to a healthy planet live in the greenery of native plants; that is, plants native to our specific region. These plants have been evolving here for the last 40 million years, and our insects and animals have evolved right along with them. Many insects and the larvae of butterflies and moths cannot survive without specific native plants. As our climate changes, these will be the plants best suited to survive, having come through eons of change from tropical to glacial to everything in between.
There are ten easy things you can do to begin turning your garden back into an abundant Eden. I’ll be giving a presentation here at my garden grounds about these ideas and many others that are simple and inexpensive to implement in your gardens and yards (and balconies!). I’d love to have you join me. Together we really can heal the world.
We’ll be gathering on Saturday, August 26th from 11am to 1pm. The program is free, but it would be great if you could RSVP at the website natureshaven.earth (under link to classes). We’d like to have an idea how many to expect under our solar-covered patio. The address is 1187 NW 10th Ave., in Camas.
Jennifer Bargar, owner of the Nature’s Haven native plant nursery will be on hand, too, and if you want to order plants from her online, she can bring them to the event on Saturday. You can do all of this on the Natureshaven website.
The photo at the head of this article shows a sphinx or hawkmoth. These exquisite creatures mimic hummingbirds and fly day and night, pollinating. This is the adult version of what we call a “tomato worm.” We plant extra of everything in our yard so that we can have more of these in our yard, and so bird mothers can gather them for their hungry nestlings. The natural world is a seamless fabric of life and interdependance. Let’s all strive to be a useful, generous strand of that weaving! -Susan Knilans