It’s amazing to me how a plant like my native honeysuckle ‘Major Wheeler’ can be the MOST reliable superstar of the garden, blooming year after year and hosting dozens of species of bees and Ruby Throat hummingbirds continuously from May until November…until it isn’t.

That has been the case this year, much to my dismay. The annual and typical late May aphid infestation, which is usually dealt with swiftly and efficiently by lady bugs and birds, continued well into July this year. Our above-average rainfall this spring and summer probably had something to do with it as the honeysuckle pushed out oodles of juicy new growth, the perfect meal for hungry aphids.

my golden rule of gardening

Since my mantra is ‘don’t poison the food chain’, I looked the other way. And waited. Instead of spraying, even with ‘safe’ products like insecticidal soap or neem oil, I monitored and watched to see how Nature would come to the rescue. As the vine would push out new growth, aphids would quickly descend to continue their feast. It was difficult to watch. I did cut back some of the heavily damaged growth, but that was the extent of my intervention. During last month’s garden tour, all the other native honeysuckles were in some stage of beautiful bloom. But ‘Major Wheeler’ just sulked. It was sad.

It would have been SO EASY to just spray the vine and be done with it, especially with the knowledge that 100+ garden visitors would soon be passing by. But I know that any type of treatment that will kill an insect like aphids also poses a threat to aphid predators, including other beneficial insects and, of course, our native songbirds. This morning after the rains cleared, I looked out the window to discover my beautiful honeysuckle loaded with fresh, aphid-free blooms. Hurray!

More important to me than the beautiful bloom display of the honeysuckle, is the health and well-being of the songbirds that call The Big Little Garden ‘home’. For almost 30 years, the gardens have hosted generations of chickadees, house wrens, Carolina wrens, cardinals, Baltimore orioles, catbirds, song sparrows, chipping sparrows, hummingbirds, blue jays, robins, mockingbirds, red-winged blackbirds, house finch, goldfinch, mourning doves, northern flickers, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers, the occasional pileated woodpecker, grosbeak, and roaming hoards of wild turkeys, just to name a few.

All of these creatures inhabit the gardens to feast on caterpillars and insects, aka ‘baby bird food’. As I type this blog post outside on the patio, a very pregnant-looking female hummingbird picks tiny insects out of the air in between sips of nectar from the garden. Just this morning I snapped this photo of an adult chickadee busy at work scouring the garden for caterpillars and insects to feed her (his?) young nestlings in the orange house. The youngsters won’t visit my bird feeders for weeks, and even when they do learn about bird seed and sugar water, their primary food source will still be supplied by the garden, not by the bird feeders. The birds and I have a deal. I don’t poison the food chain, and in return, they keep the insects under control. It works extremely well for all involved.

So, when I see homeowners bombing their lawns and gardens with pesticides and herbicides, I cringe. It’s sad that our society has been brainwashed into thinking that we need ‘perfect lawns’ and that we must ‘destroy all bugs’ at any cost. I recently saw an individual spraying Roundup all along the edge of his lawn where it meets the curb, presumably to eradicate a bit of crabgrass (which is an annual and would die on its own soon anyway). Since then, we’ve had inches of rain. Where do you think those chemicals ended up? In addition to seeping into the soil, they were washed away into the sewer and eventually into our water supply.

It’s amazing that even with an $11 billion dollar class-action lawsuit settlement, that Roundup is still available for sale. You can educate yourself with simple Google searches and see warnings like ‘Keep children and pets off of lawns treated with Roundup for at least 24 hours.” Personally, I view that as a huge red flag as to the general toxicity of this popular product. Even if you don’t care about the impact on the natural world, how about the cancer risk it certainly poses to yourself, your family and your pets?

This article from NIH is entitled Major pesticides are more toxic to human cells than their declared active principles. So, while individual components of a pesticide may be deemed ‘safe’ by the manufacturer, the combination of all of the ingredients in the product make it exponentially more toxic. This publication from Penn State Extension discusses both ‘acute and chronic toxicity’ concerns among major pesticides, and cautions: ‘Despite the fact that some pesticide products are considered only slightly toxic or relatively nontoxic, all pesticides can be hazardous to humans, animals, other organisms, and the environment if the instructions on the product label are not followed. Use the pesticide only as recommended by the manufacturer. As the applicator, you are legally responsible for any misuse of a pesticide.’

How well do you trust yourself and/or your neighbor to follow manufacturer recommendations? I could go on, but I think you all know where I stand. Chemical intervention, even with so-called ‘safe’ products is a massive slippery slope, and I just won’t go there. It just perplexes me why someone who takes the time and effort and makes the financial investment to plant a garden or a tree or a shrub, would then contaminate it with a product meant to kill the very living things that need the plant(s) in order to survive.

Thanks for listening and feel free to comment below. I would love to hear your thoughts on this important topic.

~ Barb