Garden -- March 2016

Last month I talked about preventing Japanese beetles.  Mosquitoes are worse -- and better.

Here is McGrath's plan for suppressing mosquitoes.
http://wtop.com/garden-plot-living/2016/02/garden-plot-lets-talk-mosquito-prevention/

Notice that you are going to decoy the females into laying eggs in poisoned water.

There are other things you can do.  A number of flowers have two benefits; they're good for pollinators and they repel mosquitoes.  They include lavender, bee balm, and marigolds.

You can attract bug eating birds.  You can put up bird apartment houses, which could attract purple martins.  They might get taken over by sparrows, but that isn't a bad thing because sparrows eat aphids.

Plant chokeberries and blueberries.  These will attract catbirds, mockingbirds, and other bug eaters, but most especially yellow warblers which eat mosquitoes.   Euonymus, which makes nice hedges, is another berry that bug-eating birds like.  Just make sure you prune only at the end of winter before the flowers come  on, otherwise you destroy the berries before they are born.

Also now is the time to buy your corn gluten meal to suppress crabgrass and other broadleaf weeds, and the compost to plant your early leafy greens and peas.  That's the big job for March.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved