Easy But Effective Ways To Garden For Wildlife

Forget chemicals and focus on encouraging more wildlife into the garden to take care of pests for you. Val Bourne reveals how to take a more natural approach

- Val Bourne

A Successful garden relies on attracting lots of insects and mini beasts and learning to appreciate how they interact. But as gardeners, we’ve been taught to separate these creatures into ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’. In practice, this doesn’t really work. For example, you might loves thrushes and hate snails, yet snails form a major part of a thrush’s diet in early summer. Similarly, you cannot have hedgehogs without at least some slugs on which they can feed.

It’s all a question of balance: we need just enough sinners to keep the saints healthy and happy; not so many that we are overrun with them.

In spring, you may find your broad beans are covered with blackfly – a type of aphid. Leave them alone and in a well-balanced garden the seven spot ladybird will soon find them. She’ll lay clusters of 30 oval eggs near the colonies and the larvae will devour the black fly. Small parasitic wasps, hoverflies, and birds – who gather aphids to feed their fledglings – they are all allies against this pest and, with their help, a colony of black fly can appear and disappear again within a few days.

Natural balancing act

It might go against the grain, but leaving these pests alone is often the best approach – and by doing so you will be giving the natural world a big boost. Bear in mind that a single nest of blue tits will need 10,000 small insects in the three weeks before they fledge. And while spraying pests may seem the answer, it often just makes the problem worse.