Nicole Johnsey Burke explains how to attract beneficial insects like hoverflies to your garden instead of trying to eliminate all bugs. Plant garlic chives as a perennial that draws hoverflies, which pollinate crops and eat aphids. A balanced garden with beneficial insects produces more than a chemical-treated one.
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Everybody tells me they want a bug-free garden, but this garden is proof that you actually want more bugs in your garden, not less. Anytime you put plants out in nature, bugs are going to be a natural part of the equation, and the only way to get rid of all these bugs is to use really harsh chemicals. But if you plant your garden up the way we planted this one, you're going to find that you have something so much better than a bug-free garden, and I'm going to show you how. So the first thing we've got to establish with the vegetable garden is that one of our main goals is productivity, and there are a lot of plants— not all plants, but there are a lot of plants in the vegetable garden that rely on pollination in order to create more food for you. These would be things like squash, zucchini, cucumbers, all kinds of fruiting plants. They really benefit from getting pollinated, and that kind of pollination, it happens through insects and some birds, so bees, butterflies, all kinds of wildlife. They move the pollen from one plant to the next, and that is what really increases the production in a garden. So if we're trying to get a completely bug-free garden, we're actually decreasing the productivity in our garden, which oftentimes is the whole reason why we're growing it. But bugs aren't just good for pollination; they're good for a lot of other things too. Like, take these bugs that are absolutely swarming these plants right here in my mom's garden. So here you're going to see dozens of hoverflies. Hoverflies love to soak up the pollen from all garlic chives, and the best news is that hoverflies are all around these plants laying eggs for baby hoverflies. What do baby hoverflies like to eat? Aphids, aka the bad bugs. So hoverflies are one example of what we call beneficial insects, where instead of doing harm to the garden, they actually do good. They not only help move pollen from plant to plant, but they also create predators for all the bugs that we're trying to contend with that like to get to our harvest before we do. So by putting garlic chives throughout my mom's garden, we created something that's so much better than a bug-free garden. We created a balanced garden where so many of the plants are attracting good bugs to this garden so that we don't even have to worry about the bad ones. But the trick is, how do we keep them here? I created a whole workshop to help you set up your garden in the first place if you don't have a garden yet, or if you have a garden but you don't love it. You can get a link to start watching it right below this video. It's great to add annual plants to your garden, things like zinnias and marigolds, but the real way to create a balanced garden is by adding in perennial herbs, things like these very powerful garlic chives. We planted these garlic chives over a year ago, and they have thrived in this garden for all 12 months, and they'll stay in this garden for many years to come. Every single year, my mom can divide these chives and put them in other parts of the garden, and every year after frost or snow, these chives are gonna pop back, protect the garden throughout the entirety of the growing season, and then flower like this and bring in hundreds of hoverflies to stay in the garden year-round. When hoverflies and other beneficial insects sense that there are perennial plants in your garden, plants that will be there year after year, they set up habitat in your garden. They lay eggs for the next generation. You end up having an army of beneficial insects that stay in your garden long-term. Garlic chives are just one of 7 plants that I use to pest-proof my mom's garden, and I made a whole video showing you how to plant and grow each and every one of them, and you can watch that right here.
