Fighting pests in our gardens couldn't be easier with a few easy to grow plants that take care of themselves.  They can be planted covertly among your vegetables, or prominantly displayed within  flowerbeds close by. 

Vegetable garden friendly flowers need only to be planted once, and they'll return to help you fight the pests in your garden each year, allowing you to tend to the bounty of your harvest.

Sweet alyssum, Cilantro, Dill, Buckwheat, Cosmos, Sunflower, Calendula, Feverfew, Amaranth, and Verbena are some of the favored plants that attract the beneficials.

Sweet alyssum (Lobularia maritima)  planted in small clumps or long ribbons of edging, is the top contender, with its winning fragrance and appealing display.

Queen Ann's lace type flowers such as Cilantro and Dill  attract large numbers of hover flies and parasitic wasps. The hover flies lay their eggs on broccoli, lettuce and other aphid-prone plants. When the larvae hatch, they hang out on the undersides of leaves, patrolling for pests.

A single young hover fly maggot can eat hundreds of aphids before it grows into nectar-sipping adulthood.

Parasitic wasps lay their eggs right into aphids, caterpillars, leafhoppers, and other undesirables, consuming them from the inside out.

Buckwheat is a summer cover crop that does double-duty by bringing in predatory flies, lady beetles, lacewings, and other garden friends. Let it go to seed and it will self-sow with abandon.

Members of the sunflower family: Cosmos, Calendula, Feverfew, and Sunflowers, are happy additions to the garden for lots of reasons. Their bold colors make a striking splash, and keep necessary pollinators close at hand as well as attract predatory wasps and flies.  Birds often perch on sunflower stalks, surveying the garden for a bug feast.

Amaranth provides habitat for beneficial ground beetles, which feed on beetle eggs, small larvae, and sometimes slugs(!), and also supplies plentiful seeds for songbirds.

Last but not least, if watching butterflies peacefully flit about in your garden rather than dodging flies and wasps sounds appealing , Verbena bonariensis is the perfect plant to add to your gardens.

Fighting garden pests can be as simple as sprinkling out a handful of seeds and watching the cycle begin.  To garden up a popular phrase:  "Plant it, and they will come."