Free good-bug field guide
Beneficial insects.
Not every bug is the enemy. These are the predators and parasites that eat your aphids, hornworms, slugs, and mites, for free all season. Learn to spot each one (their larvae look scary on purpose), what it hunts, and how to build a garden it wants to live in. One ladybug larva eats 400+ aphids before it grows up.
The 6 good bugs to know
Tap any card for the full guide: how to identify it, what it hunts, and how to invite it in.
The aphid vacuum every garden wants, and its ugly larva does most of the work.
The delicate green adult is harmless; its larva is a soft-bodied-pest assassin.
Looks like a tiny wasp, stings nothing, and its larva quietly eats your aphids.
Tiny, stingless wasps that turn hornworms and aphids into nurseries.
The night-shift predator that eats the slugs and cutworms you never see.
The garden's most famous ambush hunter, dramatic but not the aphid answer.
Don't buy bugs. Build habitat.
Bagged ladybugs fly away within a day. What works is making your garden a place predators want to live: small-flowered plants like alyssum, dill, and yarrow to feed the adults, a shallow water dish, mulch and undisturbed corners for shelter, and no broad-spectrum sprays, which kill the good bugs faster than the pests. The two purchases that actually work: green lacewing eggs and Trichogramma cards. Every guide tells you honestly which camp it's in.
Plan a garden good bugs want to live in
PlotToTable sizes your beds, spaces every crop for airflow, and flags the pests that hit what you grow, so the predators that eat them have a reason to stay.