Help halt the decline

You can help wildlife by gardening organically, says Val

- Val Bourne

I DO a fair few gardening talks and my favorite one is about the insects in my organic garden. As someone who doesn’t use any chemical props at all, the gardeners I speak to are often surprised to hear that the insecticide they’ve used to kill their aphids is also killing their ladybird adults, ladybird larvae, and lacewing and hoverfly larvae.

I point out two other things as well. Darwin’s theory, about natural selection, means that it’s the aphids with chemical resistance that survive. Given that they produce identical clones, their offspring also have resistance to that chemical. I also point out that fine chemical sprays enter our lungs and get pumped around our bodies. And those chemicals can stay with us.