What insects/small creatures benefit your garden?

[Primalclaws1974]

I have heard that worms help irrigate the soil. Mom always said spiders ate the insects that damaged plants. Bees obviously pollinate. For some reasons people have always wanted snails in their garden, but I don't know why that is. What other helpful, tiny critters are there?

 

[Chuck]

I have heard that worms help irrigate the soil. Mom always said spiders ate the insects that damaged plants. Bees obviously pollinate. For some reasons people have always wanted snails in their garden, but I don't know why that is. What other helpful, tiny critters are there?

Snails can be good or bad. The snails that look like an ice cream cone are good snails. The one's that are flat and in a spiral are bad snails. I would suggest that you start off by purchasing the Texas Bug Book by Malcolm Beck and Howard Garret. All of the bugs listed are NOT just in Texas. This book show both good and bad bugs and explains why

 

[Chuck]

I have heard that worms help irrigate the soil. Mom always said spiders ate the insects that damaged plants. Bees obviously pollinate. For some reasons people have always wanted snails in their garden, but I don't know why that is. What other helpful, tiny critters are there?

In warm weather my garden has a lot of helpers. Toads, lizards, beneficial insects like praying mantis, assassin bugs, dragon flies, dung beetles and others. If a garden is organic it will have a lot of help from all kinds life but once it is introduced to chemical pesticides all of this life will disappear. As far as I know, all snails, with the exception of the Decollate snail are harmful in the garden. This particular snail is a carnivore, and its favorite food are the eggs and bodies of other snails and slugs. They are the snails with the elongated shell that resemble an ice cream cone.

 

[claudine]

I like butterflies for their aesthetic benefits They're always welcome in my garden. Just looking at their beautiful and colorful wings puts me in a good mood
As for snails, I didn't know that some of them are good.

 

[Pat]

We have lots of birds in the yard more than anything else. I don't see many bees, we have the carpenter bees on the deck and that is about it. We have been seeing more butterflies but not many and of course ants and spiders.

 

[Arielphf]

I have found a new garden helper I'm in love with.

For some reason, my daikon radishes got covered with aphids this summer! I sprayed with soap and encouraged ladybugs, but after a while, I just gave up! They had won and I wrote off the daikon.

Then, before I'd had a chance to pull them up, I noticed these really weird bronze colored aphids. I wasn't sure what was going on, but on closer inspection, I found that the bronze ones were actually dead! My aphid population explosion had attracted some kind of parasitic wasp that took those aphids OUT! I love these little guys! I only hope they can survive in my greenhouse over winter!

These are the aphid 'mummies' that the wasp leaves behind. After these guys came, I could not find a single live aphid.