By Carolyn Barnes

Town Crier Correspondent

As interest in organic, pesticide-free gardening increases, critters such as praying mantises are attracting more local admirers.

For Melissa and Mark Bindon of Mountain View, the mantises arrived in the mail last spring, concealed in a swollen brown egg pouch about the size of a very small new potato or large peach pit.

“My father’s wife sent the pouch to Jamie, our daughter,” Melissa said. “She ordered it from the Territorial Seed Company in Umpqua, Oregon.”

Prized for their aphid-eating appetites, praying mantises are about the size of small spiders when they hatch - 100 to 150 per egg pouch - and then grow to look like four-inch-long black sticks.

“They look like a fat stick - they really get big,” Mark said. “People would stop by last summer just to hang out and watch them.”

“One neighbor said, ‘Oh my God, it’s just like something out of the National Geographic,’” Melissa recalled.

Webster’s New World Dictionary describes the mantis as an insect of Mantis or a related genus (suborder Mantodea) that has a long prothorax, feeds upon other insects, clasps its prey in upheld forelimbs as if in prayer, and is harmless to man.

“They go right after aphids, for starters,” Melissa said. “We immediately put the hatched mantises on the roses, and about a dozen of them stayed in our yard all summer - in fact, as late as Halloween I’d be out there cleaning up the roses and see them.”

But first, there was just the brown pouch in a bag on the kitchen counter.

“I went into the kitchen one morning and heard a sound and thought, What the heck is that?” Melissa said. “Then I realized, Oh, it’s the praying mantises - they’ve hatched.”

They put some mantises in canning jars and gave them to friends and neighbors and Jamie took some to her nursery school in Mountain View.

“I saw the mantises move their arms, like they were saying, ‘Go away,’” Jamie said.

As the mantises in the Bindons’ garden grew up, they did more than eat aphids: “We definitely saw a change in the number of spider webs - much fewer last summer,” Mark said. “We saw them in the irises and on the lemon trees, too.”

As 2001 moved into spring, the family discovered the ultimate proof that the mantises felt at home. A small brown egg sac was discovered attached to their side fence, in a warm corner that receives the afternoon sun. By the time this article is published, a new generation of mantises will have hatched and begun their life cycle anew.

An egg sac of praying mantises can be purchased for around $6 at many local home and garden centers, in the “beneficial insects” department.

“We are both totally sold on them,” Melissa said.

She purchased her beneficial nematodes online from Gardensalive.com, an “environmentally responsible” company that also offers “hungry redworms to speed up decomposition in compost piles,” lady beetles for aphid control, responsible fertilizers, and pest control, plant disease control and pet, lawn and rose care products.

“Organic is my preference, and they sell excellent things,” said Melissa, whose vegetables are said to jump right out of the ground.