THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE - One of the common frustrations of gardening is having to deal with creepy, crawly insects that chew up the leaves of your plants and their fruits once they eventually make them, with bugs such as aphids, snails and mealybugs being some of the notable offenders.
Doug Yanega, senior museum scientist for the Entomology Research Museum at UC Riverside, said that it’s better to create conditions in your garden that will draw the bugs in rather than buying the bugs.
“The rule of thumb for getting beneficial insects into your garden is the field of dreams,” Yanega said. “It’s the principle if you build it they will come. If you make a nice a garden that has native plants in it then you will attract the native insects that benefit from that garden. You can make it into an ecosystem that will become better sustaining. It’s not the kind of thing that you can really push by buying stuff and bringing things in, except for the plants themselves.”