Green tree frog in my frog friendly garden

During the last lot of rain I heard the calls of three different stripey marsh frogs around my garden!I also heard the deep calls of a green tree frog!

This is so exciting because it has been a few years since I heard our native frogs in my garden. Unfortunately the frogs had been driven out when cane toads overtook my garden. Cane toads out-compete our native frogs for food and they will even eat the frogs.

So why is it important to have a frog-friendly garden?

Frogs tell us so much about our environment. If you have frogs in your garden it means that the area is low in toxic chemicals.

Frogs absorb pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals through their skin and these chemicals kill them! So you won’t see or hear frogs if you or your neighbours use chemicals. This includes all manner of weed killers based on glyphosate, as well as lawn weed and feed products.

How to create a frog-friendly garden?

Pot of water chestnuts where the sedge frogs love to hide

Frog-friendly gardens are easy to create! The first step (and for some people the hardest) is to stop using nasty chemicals!

Then you need to create the perfect environment for the frogs. You can do this by adding a natural water pond or water feature. I use lots of pots for my frog ponds. You can fill them with plants such as water lilies, lotus, water irises and even edible plants such as water celery, watercress and water chestnuts.

Frogs also need places to hide from predators and to keep cool, so it’s important to leave plenty of mulch and leaf litter around. They also need some rocks or logs to sit on and sun themselves. My frogs love using garden statues that I’ve placed in the garden.

Next you need to eliminate cane toads.

These are an introduced pest that will out-compete your native frogs for food. They have even been known to eat native frogs!

Cane toads can be eliminated manually by collecting the frogs and placing them in the fridge until they go to sleep. You then move them into the freezer and from there out into the garbage on garbage night.

I use biodynamic peppers to control cane toads (Magical Biodynamics) . The peppers work on making my garden inhospitable to cane toads so they go elsewhere. This allows space for the frogs to move back in.

Create the perfect environment and the frogs will come! And you will have the joy of knowing that your garden is safe for frogs to live in. And that means that it’s safe for you and your family!

Your Edible Garden Guru

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Ladybeetle lays eggs in your garden

So what do I mean by Good Bugs?

Good bugs are those insects that prey upon bad bugs in your garden. Bad bugs include caterpillars, scale, aphids and mealybugs.

There are plenty of beneficial bugs including lady beetles, lacewings and praying mantis. These good bugs also include the larvae of insects such as cryptolaemus, which is the larvae of ladybeetles.

Encouraging the Good Guys

When you encourage good bugs into your garden, your veggies grow bigger and better, and suffer fewer pest attacks. And you won’t need to use any pesticides to get rid of the bad pests!

In fact, you will have to stop using pesticides before these good guys will visit your veggie patch!

This is because pesticides kill the good guys just as quickly as they kill the bad guys!

My favourite Good guy is the larvae of Lady Beetles, also known as cryptolaemus or the Mealy Bug Killer! And they deserve this title as they eat dozens of mealybug each day!

I once watched a mealybug killer clean up an infestation of mealybug on my lime tree. I had a pretty bad infestation at the start, and by day 3 there were only a few shell corpses.

The Mealybug killer works by disguising itself to look just like its prey. In fact, the only way you can tell them apart, the mealybug killer moves on its own. This is an important distinction, as the mealybug itself has no legs and requires ants to move it around. Mealybugs live on your fruit trees and in your veggie garden!

So, if you see a mealybug that is walking, it really is a good guy – the mealybug killer!

Mealybug killer

You can purchase these good guys online, from places like Bugs for Bugs. However, I find it just as easy to encourage the good guys into your garden. You can do this by providing food for the good guys with plenty of flowers and nectar.

Providing a pesticide-free garden

You also need to provide a pesticide-free garden. When I talk about not using pesticides, this includes those pesticides that are sold as “natural” and “harmless” such as Pyrethrum.

These pesticides are considered “natural” as they have their genesis in nature. The chemicals in these pesticides have been extracted or copied from plants. However, they are made into a concentrate that is hundreds of times more poisonous than that found in plants!

And these pesticides kill all bugs, both the good guys and the bad guys. So instead of spraying your veggies with pesticides why not give nature a chance to use its own predators to kill the bad bugs in your garden?

When you do this you will notice that you have many more insects in your garden, but many of these will be good bugs.

So why not take a walk around your garden and look at all the abundant insect life? Many of these insects are helping you in your gardening endeavours https://www.thedelectablegarden.com.au/good-bugs/. They do this by pollinating your plants, but also by eating other bugs!

Until next time

Your Edible Garden Guru

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Now before anyone goes into a frenzy about how it is not good to feed our native birds, I will start by saying this posts is not about leaving our “human” foods like breads or seeds for our native birds.

Sulphur Crested Cockatoo

It is about planting fruits and vegetables that our native birds and other wildlife want to eat! And one particularly cheeky Cockatoo who has moved into my garden!

I had noticed recently that when I ventured into my fruit garden I was finding at least one empty passionfruit rind each morning.

At first I was worried about fruit bats. But only one passionfruit was missing at a time. And it had been completely cleaned of seeds and pulp.

Then I worried that the rats had returned. But NO. When the rats invaded they didn’t just eat one piece of fruit at a time. They ate all the fruit, plus the leaves, stem, in fact the whole damn plant! They leave a scorched earth in their wake! But I digress.

So, I figured I was possibly feeding a possum. In my experience the possums are pretty polite. They normally only take one or two pieces of fruit, so I figured I had enough to share.

Anyway, I happened to be watering the garden the other morning when I came upon the sneaky passionfruit eater. It was a very happy, sulphur crested cockatoo. I just had to take a short video of him 🙂

I hope that you enjoy it!

Happy gardening 🙂

Rohanne, your Personal Gardening Expert

The post Sharing the love: Feeding our Native Birds appeared first on Delectable Garden.

I raise this as many gardeners reach for chemical poisons to deal with insect and pest invasions. They do this without thinking these poisons also affect the native bees and honey bees!

Bees are in big trouble overseas. With hives collapsing due to the impact of pesticides and diseases on the worker bees, which leave the Queen bees and young bees without food.

Honey bee

At present, Australia is almost completely clear of the Varroa mite and other parasites and diseases.

And, we also have a lot of native bees. These include the native stingless bees, which are the only native hive bees we have.

There are also a lot of solitary bees that pollenate our flowers. This produces the fruits and vegetables we eat. And therefore we benefit!

Without bees, we would have very little food!

It has been estimated that Bees pollinate around 90 percent of the food crop species that we eat. When bees pollinate fruits and vegetables, this enables them to produce seeds. This then ensures new plants can grow.

So, we would lose all those plants that bees pollinate. And it isn’t just fruits and vegetables that would be affected!

We would also the lose all of the animals that eat those plants. Including us humans!

Enough about the bad news!

Blue Banded Bee

As I said previously, in Australia we have around 1500 species of native bees. And you can encourage these bees into your garden!

All they need is a pesticide-free garden and a source of food.

Native bees love pollinating any types of flowers. They love pollinating your fruits and vegetables. Also, they love pollinating all our native plants.

Worried about being stung?

Native bee feeding (this is greatly magnified!)

Many of the solitary native bees are capable of stinging you. I have lots of the solitary native bees, including Blue-banded bees and Carpenter bees. However, they seem to avoid contact with humans and everything I have read says that they are a lot more laid-back than honey bees! This is good news as the Carpenter bee is around 2.5cm big. I would imagine it would pack quite a punch if it stung you!

I also have a lot of the native hive bees in my garden. These are known as stingless bees, because they don’t sting! They can bite you if you invade their hive but they can’t inject a poison!

This was one of the first things that attracted me to the native bees. I am allergic to bee stings! But several plants in my garden were not being pollinated so I knew that I needed to attract more bees!

When I heard about native bees that didn’t sting I thought “I must get some of those!”

And my garden has never looked back! So I now have two native bee hives.

All my fruit trees and my vegetables get pollinated. In fact I regularly let vegetables and herbs like lettuce, bok choy and coriander go to seed. This ensures the bees have plenty of food. It also means that I get lots of free seeds and seedlings.

So why not plant some fruits and vegetables to help encourage native bees into your garden!

Happy gardening 🙂

Rohanne, Your Personal Gardening Expert

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The post Native Bees and Backyard Buddy’s for Your Garden appeared first on Delectable Garden.

Hoverfly

I raise this as many gardeners reach for chemical poisons to deal with insect and pest invasions. They do this without thinking these poisons also affect the good bugs!

This was demonstrated following the decision by the Big Green shed, and other stores, to cease selling some systemic insecticides. These insecticides include Confidor and Bug Killa. Many gardeners queried the decision. As a result they wanted to know what would be provided as an alternative!

The reason that poisons like Confidor and Bug Killa are no longer being sold was precisely due to their impact on good bugs.

These insecticides contain a class of poison know as neonicotinoids. Neonicotinoids have been strongly implicated in the death of bees. And in aiding the collapse of bee hives in Europe and the UK.

The ban also applies to other products such as Conguard and Lawn bug killer, which also contain neonicotinoids. Surprisingly, Advantage/Advocate, used to kill for tick protection on your pets also contain neonicotinoids!

So what are good bugs and why do we need them?

Bee pollinating

Good bugs include a range of insects that actually benefit plants and therefore we humans also benefit!

Good bugs include bees and other beneficial insects, including dragonflies and hoverflies. They help us because they pollinate flowers, which produces fruits and vegetables.

They also help by killing and controlling some of the bad bugs that infect our plants. Without good bugs, we would have no food!

The problem with random use, and overuse of insecticides is that there is a knock-on effect.

These insecticides also poison frogs, lizards and skinks, and even birds which feed on the poisoned insects.

Speaking about alternatives!

When you speak to gardeners about alternatives, like letting nature do the work with good bugs, you often get a blank stare. If you are lucky you will get questions like “There are good insects?”. Or “How long will that take?”.

Try and get the gardeners to explain what the actual problem is that they have been using the pesticide to treat, often it has been a case of mis-diagnosis! People have been spraying neonicotinoids to deal with fungal diseases and even with things that show that a plant is healthy!

We have been trained to want a quick fix, without understanding what it is that we are fixing! Results with a simple spray of a poison!

But do people realise that they are potentially poisoning themselves and their families?

The manufacturers and suppliers maintain that when these poisons are used correctly there are minimal adverse impacts.

However, they have no control over how the general public use these chemicals!

I have been told about gardeners who sprayed neonicotinoid poisons every weekend as a prevention against insect attack!! Sadly they could not understand that they were also preventing their crops from being pollinated!

I hope the insect world has enough intelligence to declare these gardens a “No fly zone”.

Let us know what you think about the use of insecticides like neonicotinoids and the decision to cease selling these products.

Happy gardening

Rohanne, Your Personal Garden Expert

Related Posts

How to deal with Common Destructive Pests in the Garden

http://www.thedelectablegarden.com.au/beneficial-insects-and-your-veggie-garden/

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They eat lots of mosquito larvae, caterpillars, ants and other pests that attack your edible fruits and vegetables.

Sadly, native frog numbers are in decline due to declining habitat and our use of poisons in the garden. Frogs have thin skins that readily absorb common garden chemicals, including those in weed and feed lawn mixes.

Sedge frog in the garden

Native frogs will also die if they eat poisoned insects.

That is why it is better to avoid using pesticides. It is also better to use organic fertilisers from plant or animal sources, as inorganic fertilisers (and some organic ones) contain wetting agents that can be toxic to native frogs.

It is also important to have cool places where the frogs can live especially during our hot summers.

I have several shallow frog ponds in my garden, where the native frogs can live and breed. At present I have several stripey marsh frogs in the garden as well as some sedge frogs. The frogs eat mosquito larvae and other insects which helps to keep the garden healthy.

I also add pacific blue-eye fish to the water ponds to help keep them clear of mosquitos. The pacific blue-eyes are native fish that don’t eat frogs eggs so are best for these types of ponds.

Stripey marsh frog in the garden

I love listening to them call each other as I am drifting off to sleep. By having the frogs make a home in my garden it tells me that my garden is healthy so I can safely eat the plants that I grow.

Why not try and make your garden more frog friendly? If you provide the right environment they will come! Even better, join with neighbours to extend the frog friendly habitat.

Happy gardening 🙂

Rohanne, your Personal Garden Expert

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