Is there anything that's always a 'foe' at your place?

knighter's thread got me thinking. While pretty much everything has a place in my garden, there's a few things I always try to kill: green vegetable bugs, passion vine hoppers and tomato fruit worms.
The first two don't seem to have any predators, but are pretty voracious, while tomato fruit worms will put holes in every tomato before the parasitic wasps get going.
What's your local foe/s, or do you let them balance themselves out?

 

Hi Leila

I don't seem to have too many nasty little critters to worry about in the garden. Mostly it is brush turkeys, possums and those cane toads. Just yesterday I was moving some mulch around to plant some lettuce, shallots and beetroot and found 6 in a 2m x 1m area. With no rain to speak of in the last month they are getting in anywhere there is a bit of moisture. I've been lucky that no pesky bugs has eaten my veges. touch wood!

 

snails

 

I forgot slugs and snails!

 

I have minuscule slugs and snails. I question where the parents are and how big these guys are going to get.

 

Brush turkey,fruit fly, grasshoppers, caterpillars and scale (ants).
Turkey is the worst by far costs me over a thousand dollars a year in lost production that I have to buy in a shop.

 

Cane toads.

And the neighbours chook killing dogs.

Everything else can stay and I'll work around it.

 

I am not fond of finding a fer-de-lance in the garden near our home or a coral snake. The small fer-de-lance snakes are more dangerous than the large ones, so I will admit they generally have an accident with the scythe. Coral snakes I move since you can deal with them a lot easier. (their mouths are very small and they are not aggressive). Fer-de-lances are aggressive, to the point they will come after you with not much provocation if you try to move them.

Oh, ants, the ones that bite. I need to get anteaters to come live on the property or something... I have one, but he isn't doing his job...

 

If we are talking snakes I will swap you my coastal taipan

 

No doubt, Australia wins the award on poisonous snakes.

Though a bushmaster is the largest pit viper in the world.

What is funny is the older Ticos call snakes by the closest distance you want to be to it. The fer-de-lance is a 3 meter snake, in other words, no one really worries that much about them. The bushmaster is called the 3 kilometer snake - and you don't want to be even that close if you know about it. It is called matabuey for a reason (ox killer) It is supposed to ONLY get 3 meters long. But I have heard from reliable people of ones much bigger than that. I have never seen one, and I prefer not to.

 

Black tail Deer & slugs.

For the Deer I will be using the Sepp Holzer bone salve on my trees that I would prefer they do not nibble from.

Slugs, despite the large population of frogs already, I plan to increase more ponds for heat traps & frog spawn places.

 

I often feel lucky that while NZ's overrun with all sorts of species that do massive damage (a special shout out to my nemeses possums and stoats), we don't have anything dramatic.
Squishing a few shield bugs looks pretty pleasant when compared to dealing with brush turkeys, cane toads and snakes!
Bushmaster? I thought that was just a rifle. The snake looks much scarier.

 

Snails

Local city council.

 

haha, I was just thinking that too!!!
My biggest problem at the moment is Starlings...thank god.

 

mischief, what do the starlings do at your place? Aside from making a really annoying racket and chasing all the other birds of course...
they don't seem to hang out in my garden like the blackbirds, which can move amazing quantities of mulch looking for worms.
Anything that's unable to cope with being buried in mulch has largish old nursery pots with the bottoms out, staked around them. Looks stupid, but it's keeping things alive

 

They do this little hoppy thing then pull out a worm whichI dont mind,its when they pull the plants out of the ground that upsets me.
I saw one tug a seedling out of the way,leaving it lying ontop of the soil and then fly off with a worm.
Luckily that plant survived but alot of them dont
I have to sow 3 sunflowers again but I think I'll put them in pots and plant them out when they are too big to pull out(or put a milk bottle cloche over them).
I'm resowing beetroot for teh same reason.

I think this is the downside of having alot of organic matter in the soil-lots of worms.
I may have to starve my cats.

 

I fail to see how that is a down side unless you are up to mischief.

 

Pak, breaking out the bad jokes! :clap:
While I assume that mischief's being kind of facetious, I know what she means by the 'downside' of being the local wormery and I have to be pretty vigilant with the local bird population.
Compared to the snakes, toads and deer, that's pretty pathetic I know!

 

Rats are mine, although I don't think I consider them foes as a whole. Where I used to live they seemed to be generally in balance with the neighbourhood cats and dogs, but a few times a year the young males get out of control and run round in the ceiling in the middle of the night. I can live and let live up to the point my sleep is disturbed. Then they're for the trap. But like I said it's not so much a foe thing as me taking my part as a predator in the system. The rat bodies go in the compost.

 

@ Pakabuddy,
haha, Im always up to mischief!!!

Pebble,
hehe eat the rats?