Favorite Sites About Beneficials

This past Saturday, I taught part of the Fall Vegetable Gardening class for Urban Harvest. As usual I thoroughly enjoyed it. Luckily many of the questions reminded me of why I started this blog in the first place: to share information and supplement my classes. Unfortunately, I haven't been doing that. So here goes, some of my favorite resources for attracting beneficial organisms to your garden!

First of all here is my favorite article on the topic. I read it to myself right before I teach any pest control class. http://www.finegardening.com/how-to/articles/attracting-beneficial-insects.aspx

Here is a good local site with photos of what you might encounter in your Houston garden.
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/galveston/beneficials/index.htm

Here is a link to the handout I usually give out in class. It has nice photos of the larval and adult forms of beneficial insects. It also has a few tidbits on how to attract such insects. http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/growgreen/downloads/beneficial.pdf
Note: For those of you living in Central Texas (aka Mom and Denise,) You should check out their main site http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/growgreen/garden_basics.htm

The final site is one of the best sustainable agriculture resources. At least I find it tremendously useful. http://attra.ncat.org/
I especially like their information on cover crops and green manure crops: http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/covercrop.html

It is by no means a comprehensive list, but it should give you enough information to get started. At some point I plan to layout the steps to designing a fruit and vegetable garden that incorporates attracting beneficial organisms.