Question
I am wanting to garden completely organic.  The only thing I don't know is how to get rid of the bugs that eat holes in the leaves without using sevin dust.  Any ideas on this Would be great!

Answer
Bugaboos around the garden are so easy to eliminate, I don't know why everyone doesn't do things this way.

Bewitched about leaf-munchers?  Bothered by flower-devourers?  Bewildered by root-ruiners?

It's simple.  There are good bugs, and there are bad bugs.

My first encounter with good bugs was my scale-infested Ficus tree. I'd been spraying for years - really dumb, because this was a tree  that grew in my living room window.  The little black dots would disappear for a few weeks.  Then they'd be back one morning, multiplying until I sprayed again.  I didn't want these to spread to other plants around the house -- like orchids.  So I sprayed, and sprayed, and sprayed.

Then I bought a house.

It was spring.  I left my Ficus out in the rain for a few days to make sure any Malathion residue was gone. Then I bought a box of Ladybugs from a company on the internet, Gardens Alive.  You could not buy these at the store at the time.  When the box came, I sprinkled them around the base of my Ficus, which was now covered in black dots, and ignored it for a few weeks.  This was just an experiment.  I was truly not expecting much.

But the results were amazing.

Here was a tree I had grown for 10 years, that came from the greenhouse with its own Scale problem.  Chemicals were expensive and a royal pain in the neck.  Spraying is not my idea of a good time.

But with that one Ladybug treatment, I was a convert.

I found Ladybugs worked with Aphids on my new Rose Garden.  A couple here, a couple there, and they were all over the problem.  Ladybugs, like other good bugs, are carnivores.  Setting a few near a pack of Aphids, Scale or Spidermites is like putting the family dog in front of a dish of ground sirloin.

As I explained one time to someone else: 'What makes these beneficial bugs unique is that they all do something your old-fashioned, noxious, chemical pesticides will never do. They hunt.'

See my report on 'Bugs That Are Good For Your Garden' here:

www.helium.com/items/1346851-ipm-integrated-pest-management-beneficial-insects-edward-knipling-predators

Bugs that eat holes in the leaves of your plants -- you have to find out which bugs those are.  If you put the family dog out with a bowl of lettuce, you see, the dog won't eat the lettuce.  See if you've got a lettuce problem, or a chopped sirloin problem.  If you want help with that, send me a separate question so I can write you a longer answer without maxing out my AllExperts bytes budget.  Thanks for writing - and God bless America for going green,

THE LONG ISLAND GARDENER