Rouse's Horticulture

10/26/2026

10/21/2026

One plant. Five or six species of butterflies. 🦋

Red porterweed (Stachytarpheta mutabilis) has quickly become one of my favorite plants for attracting pollinators to the garden. Its long spikes of red flowers provide a steady source of nectar, and the butterflies have certainly taken notice.

It’s a great reminder that a garden doesn’t have to be complicated to support wildlife. Sometimes, the right plant in the right place can turn an ordinary planting into a little ecosystem.

If you want more butterflies in your garden, give red porterweed a try. The pollinators will do the rest.

10/05/2026

Those tiny little stalks with what look like eggs on the ends are lacewing eggs, and they’re something you want to see in your garden.

Lacewings are one of our best natural pest-control insects. Once the larvae hatch, they become voracious predators of aphids, mealybugs, whiteflies, scale crawlers, caterpillar eggs, and other soft-bodied insects.

The interesting part is that the adult lacewing isn’t the main predator. It’s the larval stage that does the heavy lifting.

So if you find these little egg stalks in your garden, leave them alone. You’re looking at the next generation of free pest control.

This is one of the reasons I try to manage gardens as an ecosystem rather than reaching for an insecticide every time I see a bug. A healthy garden isn’t a garden without insects. It’s a garden with the right insects.

🪲 Lacewings = beneficial
🌱 Lacewing larvae = tiny predators
🐜 Aphids and other soft-bodied pests = dinner

Know your insects before you reach for the spray.

09/29/2026

I found this hornworm in a customer’s yard, and it had something pretty interesting going on.

This is a to***co hornworm, Manduca sexta, and all of these little white things are cocoons from a tiny parasitoid wasp called Cotesia congregata.

The adult wasp actually lays its eggs inside the hornworm. The eggs hatch inside the caterpillar, and the wasp larvae develop inside it.

Once they’re mature, dozens of these tiny wasp larvae emerge from the hornworm and spin these little white cocoons. Inside each cocoon, the larva goes through metamorphosis, and eventually an adult wasp emerges.

Now, the customer didn’t want “wasps” in his yard.

So I told him, “I’ll take it.”

I brought the hornworm home and put it in our garden because these are exactly the kinds of insects I want around the farm area.

These wasps are parasitoids of hornworms and other caterpillars, so they’re providing natural biological control for us.

This is one of the things I love about gardening. Sometimes the best pest control isn’t something you buy. Sometimes it’s already happening right in front of you.

You just have to recognize it and give nature a chance to do the work.

08/10/2026

The Green Lab got a little out of control. 🌱🧪

So I emptied the whole thing, cleaned it up, moved the aquarium, and finally got my growing space back in order.

The full greenhouse reset is up on YouTube.