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I was a kid in Brooklyn who was raised up on Saturday afternoon movies that had an uncommon amount of movies which featured some of the famous actors and actresses of those days dealing with zombies, werewolves and vampires. Vampires meant bats and bats to me and the rest of the tenement kids were scary.
They still sort of scare me in enclosed areas. However, I have learned that bats are very beneficial to my garden.
Did you know that bats can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes in just one hour? When we had our bed and breakfast and campgrounds in Tennessee we had lots of bats come out of the woods at night and they kept that campgrounds totally mosquito free all summer. They were a blessing. None of the campers even noticed them or at least mentioned them to us.
Here at Home Farm we encourage them for many reasons. Bat Guano or droppings is great fertilizer being high in potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen which are essential natural, organic nutrients for your herbs, flowers, ornamental grasses, vegetables and basically just about any other plant you are growing.
Plus night flying bats will eat up all those pesky pests such fireflies, gnats and moths which are also night-flying bugs and in your garden these wonderful night flying bats will eat all those bad beetles and other pests. Did you know that in one single night one bat may eat half his body weight in bugs?
So how do we encourage bats to our gardens when we do not have a belfry? Bats love dark spaces and they love enclosed spaces so you may see them hanging in your garage rafters or attics or even under your eaves. Just leave them there and give them a place to get out of in the evening. They live in the hollow of trees in the woods that comes up to two of our fence lines on our property. Because we live in a part of Kentucky that is called the “Cave Region” with over 200 real bona fide caves we get many of them coming out of the nearby caves. Plus we have a couple of fields nearby with very deep sinkholes that connect to some of those caves and we get the benefits of some of their inhabitants which happen to be night flying bats.
If that does not please you then either build or buy some bat houses. We bought two and put them down behind Glynis’ new home when it was built. A bat house needs to build out of plywood and it needs to be at least one foot wide and two feet tall. There are many free plans on the internet for building bat houses and one can Google their way to many of them.
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Author Bio Box: Arlene Wright Correll
 For more gardening or cooking information click http://www.learn-america.com/
To see Arlene’s Gardens and to read her gardening diaries and to take a walk through her pictorial garden or click on Arlene’s Books where you can download or buy her gardening & cook books, including her new book, “The ABC’s of Wine and Beer Making”. Remember to check out her artwork, especially of her fruits and vegetables. Arlene says, “All my royalties from the sale of my books go to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and I thank you for visiting my site.”
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