Here is a list of the many diseases that can be spread by cherry leafhoppers:

• Almond witches’ broom
• Apple proliferation
• Aster yellows
• Cherry X disease
• Eastern X disease
• Grapevine yellows
• Western X disease

They also leave collections of white crystalline frass on apples, pomegranates, and stone fruits.


Cherry leafhopper lifecycle

Leafhoppers lay their eggs in soft plant tissue where they are protected through the winter. Nymphs may also overwinter in tiny hideaways. Come spring, the eggs hatch, and nymphs go through several molts before reaching adulthood. These pests are most active during the hottest months of summer.


Leafhoppers are best managed with insecticidal soap.

Aphid parasites are available commercially and are frequently used to control aphids in greenhouse environments. You can attract and maintain habitat for aphid parasites by planting clumps of rye or barley. These plants attract aphids, providing a long-term food source for your aphid parasites. You can also add the flowers mentioned earlier. Because aphid parasites can fly, they will regularly scan your garden for all sorts of aphids. You should start seeing aphid mummies 10 to 14 days after releasing these hunters into your garden.

Working with aphid midges

February may feel too early to consider aphids (unless you live in the Southern hemisphere). But it’s never too soon to learn how to help your garden plants stay healthy. As temperatures rise, you may want to buy aphid midge pupae to help in your fight against aphids. Pupae arrive in the mail in containers filled with moist vermiculite or peat. Depending on the temperature, pupae emerge as adults in 3–7 days. This is important. You’ll want to time your aphid midge release to coincide with newly emerging aphid populations. If you release them too early in the season, they’ll run low on food.


Before you squish another cluster of aphids, you may want to take a closer look to see if aphid midges aren’t already at work.

Aphids are soft-bodied insects with piercing mouthparts. They insert their sharpened straws into plant tissue, where they slurp up copious amounts of sugary sap. They eat so much and so quickly, that much of what they eat simply goes in one end and out the other. This “honeydew” can be contaminated with pathogens and it attracts the attention of protective ants, but aphids have many enemies. We’re not just talking about gardeners here, either. In most cases, aphid killers are either predators or parasites, though there are exceptions.


Parasites

Parasitoids are insects that lay their eggs in, on, or near host insects. Those hosts end up being the first meals for parasitic larvae. There are many parasitic wasps that bring death to aphids. They do this by laying an egg in every aphid they can. When the eggs hatch, they eat their aphid hosts from the inside out. Gruesome, right?

Many varieties of parasitic wasps and other aphid killers are available for purchase, but you can often attract these garden helpers to your landscape with plants that provide abundant nectar and pollen. Queen Anne’s lace, coreopsis, coneflowers, cosmos, coyote brush, dandelions, dill, goldenrod, sweet alyssum, and sunflowers look lovely and they create a natural welcome mat to insects that see aphids as the perfect meal. Hedgerows also provide beneficial insects with good hiding places.

Soil mites are extremely beneficial when it comes to releasing nutrients into the soil and controlling pest populations.


Conduct an online search for ‘soil mites’ and you’ll see dozens [millions] of sites telling you how to get rid of these pencil-point size arachnids. But getting rid of them is the last thing you should do. So, what’s so great about soil mites? Let’s find out!


What are soil mites?

Mites are arthropods. This means they have an external skeleton, a segmented body, and jointed legs. They are also arachnids, like ticks and spiders, but very tiny. If you were to take a sample of soil that weighed about the same as a bar of soap, 100 g give or take, you might have 500 mites from 100 different genera in that sample. These buggers are really tiny. With the naked eye, they might look like nothing more than little brown or white dots. But these little guys are important.


While there are over 20,000 known soil mite species, with an estimated 80,000 total, it is easier to categorize soil mites by what they eat. They can be herbivores or carnivores.

Plant-eating soil mites

To something as small as a ballpoint pen tip, fungi make a great meal. So do bacteria and lichen. These scavengers are abundant in most soils and they help plants gain access to nutrients. As these soil mites graze on the fungi and bacteria that grow on root surfaces, they poop out those meals in the form of plant food. They also shred decaying plant material as they feed on the bacteria and fungi clinging to those plant surfaces. Fungal feeding mites (Oribatei) look like little orbs. Also known as turtle mites, moss mites, and beetle mites, these soil mites are very tiny. Let’s call them moss mites. Moss mites range in size from 0.2 to 1.4 mm long. This means you could fit 10-90 of them across a dime, end-to-end, depending on the species.


Insect-eating soil mites

Other soil mites are predators. Predatory soil mites feed on microscopic garden pests, such as nematodes, fungus gnat and thrips pupae, springtails, other mites, and the eggs and larvae of other insects. Most predatory soil mites are 0.5 mm long, brown, and found in the top 1/2” of the soil. [Unfortunately, I could not find any freely available photos of predatory soil mites.]


While not all mites are good, soil mites are your friends in the garden.


Let them be, and be glad they’re around!

Rough stink bug diet

Like other stink bugs, a rough’s favorite foods are plant-based. While other species prefer fruits and vegetables, the rough stink bug diet is predominantly the leaves and developing seeds of ash, boxelder, walnut, willow, and many other trees. The thing that makes the rough stink bug beneficial is that they also feed on caterpillars and leaf beetle larvae.


Rough stink bug lifecycle

Rough stink bugs spend their winters hidden under logs or the bark of trees. They may also try to get in your home. If they do, keep in mind that their name is an important clue. If you vacuum them up or squash them in your home, there will be consequences. Stinky ones. Instead, sweep them up with a dustpan and drop them into a container of soapy water or feed them to your chickens.


As spring temperatures rise, rough stink bugs become active again and start looking for a mate. Mated females lay clusters of 10 to 20 white, elongated eggs before they die. Two weeks later, the eggs hatch and pale colored nymphs emerge and begin feeding. There is one generation per year in most regions.


In most cases, getting rid of stink bugs is a good idea. The rough stink bug is an exception.

Parasitic wasps

Parasitic wasps lay their eggs in many common garden pests. This group of beneficial wasps includes braconids, chalcids, Goniozus wasps, ichneumon wasps, and Trichogramma wasps. 


Female Trichogramma wasps seek out the eggs of pesky moths and butterflies and sawflies to use as nurseries for her own eggs. When she finds one, the first thing she does is drum on it with her antennae and ovipositor to see if it has already been used. Drumming also helps her determine how big and useful the host egg is. This dictates how many eggs she will insert.


​After being inserted into a host egg, the wasp egg develops, pupates, and then hatches, after which it feeds on the contents of the host egg. This turns the host black. If you use a hand lens and see a healthy white host egg with a chewed hole, it means the egg was not parasitized and a healthy (destructive) caterpillar emerged instead.


Trichogramma wasp species

Unless you are a scientist with a very powerful microscope, you will never see a Trichogramma wasp. At 1/25“ to 1/50” long, you could fit 20 to 40 of them nose-to-tail across a dime. If you could see them, you might be struck by the simple beauty of a minuscule yellow wasp with red eyes. Or, you might not. There are over 200 species of Trichogramma around the world.


Before you order a shipment of Trichogramma wasps as a biocontrol, keep in mind that different species of Trichogramma parasitize different hosts. It is important that you order from a reputable seller to avoid releasing a threat to other beneficial insects into your garden. When reading product descriptions, take the time to do a little research before you buy. 


Trichogramma wasp eggs are shipped as larvae in host eggs that have been glued to cards. If you buy Trichogramma wasps for release, these tips will give them the best chance at being successful:

• keep cards in a warm, humid location
• wait until most of the wasps have emerged from the host eggs
• place cards only after moths are seen
• release wasps in the morning or evening, upwind of affected trees, out of direct sunlight
• do not release wasps on rainy, windy, hot, or cold days
• do not use pesticides when releasing these beneficial wasps

Keep in mind that Trichogramma wasps will not kill all the pests they come across. What they do is provide one piece of an integrated pest management program that uses natural processes to reduce the overall impact of pests, rather than spraying chemical poisons on your food.


Watch out for the yellow jackets and hornets, leave mud daubers and paper wasps to go about their business, and add some insectary plants to attract and provide for beneficial wasps, such as the Trichogramma.

Hornet diet

Adult hornets feed on sweets, such as fallen fruit, sap, and your lemonade. They also collect insects for their larvae. This is part of the reason why they cause us so much grief during picnic season. From a hornet’s point of view, it is simply defending a food source when it refuses to back down from your burger and fruit punch. In addition to your picnic, European hornets commonly chew up beetles, dragonflies, grasshoppers and crickets, katydids, locusts, mantises, moths, and other wasps. This pulp is then taken back to the colony, where it is fed to larvae in the nest.

If you start having a hornet problem while dining outside, you can reduce the chance of stings by placing a plate of meat and fruit somewhat away from the picnic table.

If hornets become a problem around your home, try excluding them before poisoning them. Those chemicals tend to create more problems than they resolve.

Beneficial chalcid wasps

​Most chalcids are parasitic wasps. They lay their eggs in several common garden pests. When the eggs hatch, larvae feed on the host insect before pupating into adult wasps. [I know, it’s sounds awful.] Those hosts include the eggs and larvae of flies, beetles, moths and butterflies, some spiders and nematodes, and true bugs. Since true bugs (Hemiptera) include aphids, leafhoppers, spittlebugs, thrips, whiteflies, and scale insects, I am all for more chalcid wasps! [Plus, I love figs!]


Figs and tiny wasps

While most chalcidoid wasps parasitize all those pests, a handful of them are phytophagous, which means the larvae hide and feed in stems, galls, seeds, and flowers. Fig flowers, in particular, are hidden clusters found inside a hollow structure called a syconium. Fig pollination is usually completed by tiny specialized wasps, such as chalcid wasps.


But, not all chalcids are good.


Chalcids as pests

Other phytophagous chalcids are not so helpful. These tiny wasps are pests because they lay their eggs in seeds. When those eggs hatch, larvae eat the seeds of pistachios and alfalfa, among others, creating burrows and allowing fungal and bacterial diseases a point of entry.
In many cases, sticky barriers can be used to reduce the damage caused by these pests. Most chalcids, however, are beneficial.


You can attract chalcid wasps to your garden by installing insectary plants, such as yarrow.

Wasps may have a bad reputation, but there are beneficial wasps, and ichneumon wasps [pronounced ick-NOO-mon] are one of those Good Guys. Well, mostly.


Ichneumon wasps are parasitic wasps and they have been around for over 15 million years. ​

Common ichneumon prey

Adult ichneumon wasps eat little or nothing. Their larvae, on the other hand, are voracious feeders of beetle, butterfly and moth, wasp, ant, fly, and sawfly larvae and pupae or chrysalises. This is what makes ichneumon wasps so helpful in the garden. They also parasitize beet armyworms, some spiders, and wood-boring grubs.

Some ichneumon wasps do this by using their long antennae to detect prey, then inserting the ovipositor into the wood, plant, or soil, to strike their prey, piercing its skin and inserting an egg. Other ichneumon wasps crawl down the stems of aquatic plants to inject eggs into water-dwelling insects. Yet another ichneumon is the parasite of a parasite, making it a hyperparasitoid. This ichneumon lays its eggs in moth-eating ant larvae. She emits chemicals that confuse the ants as she does her deed.

We’ve all heard about ladybugs, but what about twicestabbed lady beetles?


Common ladybugs, or lady beetles, have the classic red half-domed shape, stubby antennae, and multiple black spots. This particular lady beetle has a black domed shape with two distinct red spots, hence the name. If you turn one over, their undersides are red or yellow.

No, it's not a flying snake.

Introducing another beneficial insect on the garden scene: the snakefly.

Larvae have squishy bodies, and the head and first segment are hardened (sclerotised), but they look like a cross between an earwig and a ladybug larvae. [Sorry, but I couldn't find any free-to-use photos.] Snakefly larvae have 3 pairs of true legs, and, you won’t believe this: Snakeflies have an adhesive strip on their abdomens that allows them to move up walls and trees!


Snakefly lifecycle

Eggs are deposited in the soil, where they are able to absorb soil nutrients to help them grow and develop. When they hatch, larvae stay in the soil or move to the bark of nearby trees. There, they feed on soft-bodied pests, such as grubs and caterpillars, as well as the eggs and larvae of many garden pests. Snakefly larvae go through as many as 10 moltings before reaching adulthood. This process can take 2 to 6 years. Next, after temperatures reach 32°F, the larvae enter a pupal stage. Unlike other insects, the snakefly pupa is mobile, leaving its pupal cell for day trips or to relocate. The pupal stage is temperature dependent, lasts a few days to 3 weeks, upwards of 10 months. [This is one long lived insect!]


Adults snakeflies are very territorial as they feed on insects, such as mites and aphids. [Yay!] It is also believed that they occasionally nibble on pollen.


Snakeflies court one another with cleaning rituals. You may see them practicing their flirting skills by cleaning their legs and antennae when alone.


Have you seen any snakeflies in your garden? Let us know in the Comments!

​These tiny wasps serve us well in the garden, so avoid using any broad spectrum pesticides and let nature take its course.

Like their cousins, the aphids, adelgids pierce vascular bundles to suck out nutrient rich fluids. While mature, healthy trees can withstand a mild adelgid infestation, saplings, young trees, and unhealthy trees can be killed by this tiny, soft-bodied pest.


Adelgid species

Scientists are still trying to nail down adelgid classification. There are 50 known species, all of which are native to the northern hemisphere, though several invasive species have made their way into the southern hemisphere. The most commonly found adelgids in California include the invasive balsam wooly adelgid (from Europe), the Cooley spruce gall adelgid (Adelges cooleyi Gillette), and pine adelgids.


Adelgids are commonly found on stone pine and other conifer species, such as pine and spruce. Depending on the host plant, the pests are commonly known as “pine aphids” or “spruce aphids”, respectively, even though they are not actually aphids. [Thanks to my friend, Chuck, I now know that adelgids are also found on apple trees. Thanks, Chuck!]

Potato tuberworm description

Potato tuberworms are the larval form of a small grayish-brown moth. The adult moth has a 1/2-inch wingspan and dark gray or black markings. At rest, both sets of fringed wings are held close to the body, giving them a slender appearance. Females moths have a distinctive “X” pattern on their forewings when at rest.

​
Eggs are very tiny, oval, and yellowish white. The larvae, or caterpillars, are just under 1/2 an inch in length, and their color can vary, depending on what they are eating, from white or gray, to tan, pink, or yellowish. Larvae have a brown head and prothoracic shield. [A prothoracic shield is the segment just behind the head.] Cocoons are 1/2 an inch long and pale colored.

Damage caused by potato tuberworms

Young potato tuberworm larvae might burrow through leaves and stems, causing stunting and reduced crop size. As feeding and tunneling continue, the tuberworms head for their favorite food: your potatoes. Webbing and frass (bug poop) deposits can be seen at entry holes, normally found at the eyes of a potato. While other pesky tunneling insects, such as wireworms and leaf miners, tend to keep their tunnels neat and tidy, potato tuberworms are slobs. Those dark tunnels are filled with excrement.


Controlling potato tuberworms

Row covers can be used to prevent adult moths from laying eggs on your potato plants. The deeper your potatoes are growing, the more difficult it is for tuberworms to get to them, so selecting a deep growing variety is helpful if you know tuberworms are around. Also, avoid furrow irrigation, which can cause cracks in the soil. These cracks are used as elevators to lower soil levels by tuberworms.  Research has shown that insecticides do not prevent potato tuberworm infestations when erosion or soil cracks are present, or when potatoes are left in the ground longer than is necessary. Finally, harvest potatoes as soon as they are ready. Infested potatoes should be thrown in the trash and not added to the compost pile. Heavy infestations can be treated with spinosad.