Gardening for Little Girls

by Olive Hyde Foster

A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.

Johnson.

Your garden's friends and foes,—have you ever thought about them as such? You go to a lot of trouble to raise fine flowers and vegetables, and then, if you are not on the lookout, before you know it something has happened! Your rose leaves are discovered full of holes, and your potato vines almost destroyed; your tomato plants are being eaten up by the big, ugly "tomato worm," while your choicest flowers are dying from the inroads of green or brown insects so tiny that at first you do not notice them; and strong plants of all kinds are found cut off close to the ground. What further proof do you need that your beloved garden has its enemies?

Here indeed "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." If you would be free and escape such ravages, you can not wait until your foes are full-fledged and hard at work, because usually considerable damage has then been done. Instead, you should learn at the time you begin gardening all about the many difficulties you have to contend with, including the various things that prey upon your plants.

When you plant seed, for instance, and it fails to come up, you are apt to blame either the dealer or the weather man. Just as likely as not, though, some insect had attacked the seed before it was planted, or else the grubs got busy and enjoyed a full meal. These pests, with their various relations, are the most difficult of all to control, but poisoned bait (freshly cut clover that has been sprayed with Paris green,) scattered on the ground where cut worms come out at night to feed, will destroy many of them. When your plants have begun to grow, however, and you find them being nipped off close to the ground, dig close to the stem and you will probably bring to light a cut worm curled up in his favorite position, and you can end him then and there from doing further damage. The wire worm, on the contrary, works entirely below the surface, and when you spade up a long, slender, jointed, brownish, wriggling worm, quite hard, you will know that he is one of the kind to be immediately destroyed.

These grubs and worms are the different kind of caterpillars,—the children,—of several varieties of moths that fly by night, the shining brown beetle that bumps against the ceiling on a summer evening, and the funny "snap-bug." Crawling or flying, young or old, parent or child, they generally do their worst after dark. Equal parts of soot and lime, well mixed, scattered in a four-inch ring around each stem on the top of the soil, will keep away the things that crawl, while white hellebore (a poison that must not get on little fingers,) dusted on the plants will keep off most of the things that fly. Rose bugs, however, seem to come in a class by themselves! Apparently, they don't mind any of the well-known deterrents and about the only way to really get rid of them is to "go bugging," which means knocking them off into a cup of kerosene or a box where they can be killed.

Caterpillars, naked or hairy, eat vegetation, and are consequently most unwelcome visitors. The sowbug or pill-bug, while disagreeable to look at, is not quite so injurious as often thought, but the mite called the red spider can do a lot of damage. Most of the beetles seriously injure the vegetables. The saw-flies with their offspring, and certain kinds of ants (especially the "soldier ants") are as troublesome as the caterpillars, while the next family group, the grasshoppers, locusts, katydids and crickets are all great feeders,—the grasshoppers and locusts often becoming an actual plague and destroying whole crops. To get rid of the caterpillars and beetles various means are employed, such as spraying with Paris green, Bordeaux mixture, kerosene emulsion, or even strong suds made with whale-oil soap; and Paris green is also applied dry. A pretty good poison is bran-and-arsenic mixture, but the different liquids and powders make a story by themselves, and require great care in using; so you better consult some successful gardener-friend about the best one (and the way to use it,) for your particular foe.

Of the sucking insects,—those that draw out the juice or sap of the plant,—the aphides or "plant lice" do inestimable damage to all kinds of plants and flowers, while the chinch bug and garden tree-hopper seem to prefer to attack vegetables. The most familiar aphides are green, and they have tiny, soft, pear-shaped bodies, with long legs and "feelers." They usually live on the under side of the leaves and along the stems, and one good way to get rid of them is to spray with kerosene emulsion or tobacco water, or else sprinkle with clear water and then dust with tobacco dust.

Not all of the live things that you find about your plants and flowers are injurious, however, and you must learn to recognize those which are beneficial. The ladybug, although a beetle, lives on aphides, and so is your helper in destroying them. Several beetles, like the fiery ground beetle, subsist on cutworms, and the soldier bug dines on the destructive offspring of beetles and moths. The daddy-long-legs and the spider are also friends to your garden, together with many wasps.