next year's pests are already moving in 🐛
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Let's talk about the bugs you'll be seeing again next spring. You'd think a few hard freezes would take care of them. But plenty of garden pests are built to wait out winter right where they spent the summer: squash bugs under old vines, hornworm pupae tucked a few inches down in the tomato bed, cabbageworm chrysalises clinging to last year's broccoli stalks.
I know, the obvious fix is to rake everything bare and run a tiller through the beds—but that same mess of leaves and stems is where ladybugs, ground beetles, bumble bee queens, and native bees spend the winter too. So I treat fall cleanup like a spot treatment, not a scorched-earth operation. Tidy up where pests caused trouble this year, and leave the rest of the yard a little wild. That means pulling the squash vines after a squash bug summer, but leaving the healthy bean plants' roots to rot in place. It means scratching through the top couple of inches where the squash grew (that's where squash vine borers spin their cocoons) and letting the birds clean up whatever surfaces. And it means moving leaves off the beds where slugs were a problem and onto the perennial borders, where the good bugs need them. Here's how to do a targeted fall cleanup that keeps pests down (and the good bugs around). I also put together a quick chart of nine common pests, how each one overwinters, and exactly where it hides, so you know which corners of the garden to focus on. Plus the answer to a question I get a lot: Can pests overwinter in cover crops? (Some can! But that's no reason to skip them.) Seasonal tipsP.S. Before you rake the whole yard bare, find out what to clean up and what to leave for the good bugs. P.P.S. The best time to remember which beds had squash bugs is right now, not next April. Jot it down in your Ultimate Garden Diary so your crop rotation isn't guesswork come spring. |
Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."