Attract Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden

Vegetables
Written By Steven Biggs

Jessica Walliser, author of Attracting Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden, talks about creating a healthy, balanced, and diverse garden that supports beneficial insects.

Beneficial Insects

If you’ve heard the terms beneficial insects, beneficial bugs, or biological control, these all relate to this ideas of letting some bugs help us deal with the challenges that other bugs cause for us.

In commercial horticultural production, beneficial bugs are big business. They’re used for some field crops, in greenhouses, in nurseries.

In Gardens

Beneficial bugs can help to control infestations of insect pests in gardens too. The gardener just needs to know where to look…and how to garden in a way that’s friendly to these beneficial bugs.

Pittsburgh-based horticulturist and award-winning author Jessica Walliser joins us to talk about attracting beneficial insects to gardens.

“Stop thinking of your garden as only a place to please you.”

The new second edition of Jessica Walliser’s book Attracting Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden.

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Steven Biggs

Recognized by Garden Making Magazine as one of the "green gang" of Canadians making a difference in horticulture, Steven Biggs is a horticulturist, former college instructor, and award-winning broadcaster and author. His passion is helping home gardeners grow food in creative and attractive ways.


He’s the author of eight gardening books, including the Canadian bestseller No Guff Vegetable Gardening. His articles have appeared in Canada’s Local Gardener, Mother Earth News, Fine Gardening, Garden Making, Country Guide, Edible Toronto, and other magazines.


Along with over 30 years working in the horticultural sector and a horticultural-science major at the University of Guelph, Steven’s experience includes hands-on projects in his own garden including wicking beds, driveway strawbale gardens, and a rooftop tomato plantation—to the ongoing amusement of neighbours.


When not in the garden, you might catch him recording his award-winning Food Garden Life podcast or canoeing in Algonquin Park.

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