Balcony Gardening - Beneficial Critters

Just over a week ago, I wrote a blog post introducing my foray into growing all kinds of vegetables (including corn!) through balcony gardening. Check it out if you haven't already. This post is a continuation of that series, and in this one I'll be talking about the beneficial critters I've come across.

It's amazing how you can turn a man made surface built out of metal, wood, concrete, or what have you into a micro habitat with just a few square feet of greenery.

Before and after shot of my balcony from last spring and summer.

Once my garden started getting established, we had a really bad streak of wet weather, which brought on the dreaded fungus gnats. I was able to control them by turning the soil over a lot and trying a few things like sprinkling cinnamon (though I'm not sure how effective this really was). Eventually the soil dried out enough and the gnats disappeared. That's when I started noticing some new visitors to my balcony. Here are a few I was able to get pictures of:

Paper Wasp sunning itself on a corn stalk.

I'm fairly confident these were paper wasps. These little guys built a small nest outside my 4 year old son's bedroom window and would be fairly active in the morning when I was out watering. They never really bothered me and I felt like we had a mutual understanding. :-) I've read that they can be very aggressive if they or their nest are threatened, but I never had a problem with them, and they are a very beneficial type of social wasp that act both as a pollinator and a natural predator to pests.

Ladybug hanging out on an eggplant leaf. You can see hail damage holes on this plant.

By far my favorite insect, ladybugs are lean, mean killing machines. They eat destructive pests such as aphids, and are generally cool to look at. For some reason, they like to land on me. Not quite sure why.

Cellar spider (?) on a cucumber plant.

I'm not 100% sure I identified this critter correctly, but the closest thing I could find online was a cellar spider. Although, I could only count 7 legs on this one, I'm assuming it lost one somehow. People generally don't like spiders, but I am fascinated by them. If I find a spider in my house I will always capture and release. Spiders are extraordinary hunters and having one in a small garden is a blessing, in my opinion.

One really cool insect that I didn't get a picture of, unfortunately, is the hoverfly. Here's a picture I grabbed from Google, though:

Hoverfly.

The cool thing about these creatures is that, while they look like wasps or bees, they're definitely not. They look that way due to Batesian mimicry, where they take on the appearance of a more threatening species while they themselves are harmless. This helps them avoid unwanted attention from predators. Hoverflies are great pollinators and like ladybugs, eat aphids. It's a lot of fun watching a hoverfly zoom from plant to plant. They are called hoverflies because they can hover in one spot like a helicopter, almost seemingly suspended in mid-air. It's really cool to see. If I see any this year, I'll definitely try to grab a picture or video and post it!

I also put up a bird feeder which brought a lot of sparrows to the garden. Although I enjoyed watching these birds, and I have read that they catch and feed insect pests to their young, they were just making too much of a mess with their droppings, so once the bird seed was gone, I didn't replenish it. I might try again this year but keep the feeder in a less central location.

As spring fast approaches, I'm hoping to see the return of the beneficial garden dwellers I saw last year, and perhaps a few new ones!

Give me a follow if you want to track my adventures balcony gardening this year. I would also love to hear from any other balcony gardeners (or gardeners in general) and follow their progress as well, so drop me a comment if you have a blog I can follow!

Happy growing!