We love our parks and gardens at this time of the year.

This summer the Lakeshore Environmental Gardening Society (LEGS) is heralding and celebrating beneficial insects of the garden.

LEGS Chair Monika Meulman says summer is a time of growth for your garden and for watering, weeding and pest control to ensure an abundant harvest.

This season the group will be giving out Bug Garden Kits that contain bugs that are beneficial for your garden and plants.

The beneficial bugs, as they are called, go after those that eat your lettuce, torment your trees or chew the roots of your vegetables, Meulman says.

“Knowing more about the beneficial bugs in our gardens can help you protect your crops,” she says, adding the beneficial bugs can prevent the use of dangerous pesticides for your crops.

“Many bugs we might consider pests actually do the work they are meant to do to help our garden grow,” Meulman insists.

The beneficial bugs include: Rove beetles, solitary bees, lacewing eggs and Trichogramma wasps.

“By turning back to the wisdom of nature we use less harmful pesticides and still have abundance in our parks and gardens,” Meulman says.

Gardners say the beneficial bugs feed on codling moth, cabbageworm, tomato hornworm, corn earworm, corn borer, gypsy moth, leafworms, fruitworms, peach borer, diamond back moth, tomato pinworm, cutworms, bollworms, armyworms and tent caterpillars.

Thanks to a TD Park People grant, LEGS will be giving out Bug Garden Kits to help you with your yield.

The kits are available on June 20 and 21 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at The Healing Muse Apothecary, at 2859 Lake Shore Blvd. W., near Fifth St.

Other good pest-eaters for your garden includes toads, spiders for aphids or caterpillers for eating other insect pests and birds, which eat bugs.