Each gardener should try to make her or his garden into an attractive place for birds and toads. A good birdhouse, grain sprinkled about in early spring, a water-place, are invitations for birds to stay for a while in your garden. If you wish to have toads, fix things up for them too. During a hot summer day a toad likes to rest in the shade. By night he is ready to go forth to eat but not to kill, since toads prefer live food. How can one "fix up" for toads? Well, you can prepare a retreat that is quiet, dark and damp. A few stones of some size underneath the shade of a shrub with perhaps a carpeting of damp leaves, would appear fine to a toad.

There are two general classes of insects known classified according to the way their work. One kind gnaws at the plant really taking pieces of it into its system. This kind of insect has a mouth fitted to do this work. Grasshoppers and caterpillars are of this sort. The other kind sucks the juices from a plant. This is the worst sort. Plant lice belong here, as do mosquitoes, that prey on us. All the scale insects fasten themselves on plants, and suck out the life of the plants.

Now can we fight these insects? The gnawing fellows may be destroyed with poison sprayed upon plants, as they consume the poison together with the plant. The Bordeaux mixture which is a poison sprayed upon plants for this purpose.

For the other type, attack the insect directly. So certain insecticides, as they are called are sprayed on the insect. They do a deadly work of attacking, in one way or another, the body of the insect.

Insects can also trouble your plants underground. You have seen a garden covered with ant hills. Here is a remedy, but you must be careful.

This question is constantly being asked, 'How can I tell what insect is doing the destructive work?' Well, you can tell partly by the work done, and partly by seeing the insect itself. This latter thing is not always so easy to accomplish. I had cutworms one season and never saw one. I saw only the work done. If the stalks of tender plants are cut clean, you can be pretty sure the cutworm is around. What does he look like? Well, that is a hard question because his family is a large one. Should you see sometime a grayish striped caterpillar, you may know it is a cutworm. But because of its habit of resting in the ground during the day and working by night, it is difficult to catch sight of one. The cutworm is around early in the season ready to cut the flower stalks of the hyacinths. When the peas come on a bit later, he is ready for them. A very good way to block him off is to put paper collars, or tin ones, about the plants. These collars should be about an inch away from the plant.

Of course, plant lice are more common. Those we see are often green in color. But they may be red, yellow or brown. Lice are easy enough to find since they are always clinging to their host. As sucking insects they have to cling close to a plant for food, and it is easy to find them. But insects that bite do their work, and then go hide. That makes them much more difficult to deal with.

Rose slugs do great damage to the rose bushes. They eat out the body of the leaves, so that just the veining is left. They are soft-bodied, green above and yellow below.

A beetle, the striped beetle, attacks young melons and squash leaves. It eats the leaf by riddling out holes in it. This beetle, as its name implies, is striped. The back is black with yellow stripes running lengthwise.

Then there are the slugs, that are garden pests. The slug will devour almost any garden plant, be it flowers or vegetables. They lay lots of eggs in old rubbish heaps. Do you see the importance of cleaning up rubbish? The slugs do more harm in the garden than almost any other single insect pest. You can find them in the following way. During the day slugs rest underground. Trick them to the surface of the ground by watering the soil in which the slugs are supposed to be. How are you to know where they are? They are likely to hide near the plants they are feeding on. So water the ground with some nice clean lime water. This will disturb them, and up they'll poke to see what the matter is.

Apart from these common of pests, pests which attack all kinds of plants, there are special pests for special plants. Discouraging, is it not? Beans have pests of their own; so have potatoes and cabbages. In fact, the vegetable garden has many inhabitants. In the flower garden lice are bothersome, the cutworm and the slug have a good time there, too, and ants often get very numerous as the season advances. But the insect take the prize for giving trouble in the vegetable garden.

A common pest in the vegetable garden is the tomato worm. This is a large yellowish or greenish striped worm. Its work is to eat into the young fruit.

A great, light green caterpillar is found on celery. This caterpillar may be told by the black bands, one on each ring or segment of its body.

You can tell the squash bug by its brown body. This is long and slender. When killed, there is a disagreeable odor from it. The potato bug is another fellow to look out for. It is a beetle with yellow and black stripes down its crusty back. The little green cabbage worm is a perfect nuisance. It is a small caterpillar and smaller than the tomato worm. These are perhaps the most common garden pests.

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