The Life In Your Garden: Gardening for Biodiversity [Hardcover]

Saving the planet one garden at a time.Featuring full-color photography throughout, The Life In Your Garden: Gardening for Biodiversity is a guide especially for North American gardeners who seek to benefit the environment through their horticulture. Chapters guide the reader to transforming their garden into a haven of native trees, shrubs, and herbacious plants; providing food and shelter for local plants, insects, birds, and wildlife; controlling plant-eating insects naturally through insect-eating insects and songbirds; and protecting vegetables or small fruits through environmentally-friendly means such as interplantings, floating row covers, cutworm collars, and occasional hand-picking. Using floating row covers successfully requires knowledge of how insects overwinter. Some Herbivores, like the Colorado potato beetle, spend the winter as adults in the soil near the plants on which they fed as larvae... Other herbivores that overwinter near last year's plant host include the onion maggot, corn rootworm, and flea beetle (which affects many vegetable seedlings). Clearly, crop rotation must be used along with row covers to foil these herbivores. An index enhances this