Garden Centre
Monday, April 23, 2007
Pest or Pleasure?
It's always a problem, isn't it? Most of us love birdsong, glow worms, hedgehogs and mayflies … those are the things that make gardening worthwhile. But we’re not so keen on slugs and snails, cabbage whites and aphids!The difficulty arises because nature is a complicated creature. The reason we hate aphids and cabbage whites so much is that they aren’t particular about what they live on (cabbage whites will eat just about everything when the eggs hatch, although they do like cabbages a great deal) and so they thrive in our gardens. More sensitive creatures, like glow worms, require a complex set of conditions that even scientists don’t understand yet, and so they become ever rarer at the same time as the pestilential cabbage white becomes more common.
So what do you do. Well, the All Seasons Gardener tries to be as inclusive as possible. Our garden uses a range of techniques including mesh over our vegetable beds, wildlife friendly slug pellets, and predator encouragement to try and keep the garden in balance. So we have a variety of trees and nest boxes in the garden and the birds that visit are pretty good at keeping down crane flies. We have a bee log for our solitary bees, and as they pollinate our peas, beans and sweet peas, we think we get a better crop, so we don’t mind too much if we lose a few plants to caterpillars. The pond is home to fish, newts and frogs – and the frogs are very keen on picking off flies and other nuisances, and that complete ecosystem means that we get lots of mayflies and even dragonflies – no glow worms yet but we live in hope …
And that brings us to the moth. I’m not entirely sure what it is, moth identification not being one of my strengths, but it’s very beautiful. And it’s on my broad bean plants. I should have scared it off, of course, but in the end I pretended it wasn’t there. If our broad beans are eaten to the ground when is caterpillars hatch, then ‘himself’ can just say I told you so.
Labels: Pest control, Wildlife Gardening
The All Seasons Gardener at 3:17 AM
- What’s your biggest garden fault?
- Tie me daffodils down, Sport (or don’t, as the cas...
- The All Seasons Gardener’s Garden
- 6 Sexy Spring Bulbs
- Wildlife Friendly Containers
Recent Posts
Categories
- General
- Garden tools
- Garden Tips
- Pest Control
- weeds
- vegetable gardening
- Flowers
- Garden Tasks
- Wildlife Gardening
- garden ponds
- garden gossip
- Garden Secrets
My Garden
Seasonal Gardening
Gardening Feed
Subscribe to this blog
Don't see your reader listed there? Then here is a direct link to our feed.
View RSS Feed
2 Comments:
Several years ago I bought some "killer" snails at a farmer's market to get rid of my snail problem.
The predatory snails looked like empty shells so I didn't hold out much hope for their success. I was instructed to bury them in the soil, about 3 inches deep.
I bought them to get rid of indigineous snails which were attacking my citrus, and were particularly fond of lemons. After a rain, they climbed the tree and dotted the fruit so that it looked like I was growing a snail tree.
The year following my introduction of the killers --- no indigenous snails!
Five years later, the natives are just starting to reappear. And the killers? Haven't seen them at all.
My question: With all the negative controversy re. introduced species, I'm wondering if these predatory snails are a danger to any other indigenous species?
Hmmm, sounds to me like either the decollate snail or the rosy predator snail. If anybody's wondering we're talking Florida, California and other southern states of the USA here ... the citrus is the clue!
So to the decollate snail - it's an effective predator of half-grown brown garden snails in particular and - like its prey - will thrive only in cultivated habitats with frequent water. Another point to note is that some studies show that that rodents limit the feral spread of the snails by eating them. Their value in controlling the brown garden snail is considered to outweigh their minor pest attributes because they do deat new shoots and rotten or bruised fruit.
Now to the rosy predator - which eats as many as 350 common snails in its lifetime. This species has caused havoc where it was released in Hawaii and Polynesia generally, by destroying populations of rare and harmless snails, but it is an American native so it shouldn't be overly invasive in its natural environment.
With any predator you will get population crashes when the food species drops - with the decollate, you may find that if the half-grown snails were all eaten, the predator species then starved to death before the baby snails got big enough for them to bother with, or the predators may have just moved on out to a richer hunting ground when food got scarce in your garden. Then when the babies grew up, there was no control species to limit them. This is why population control through predators isn't a one off solution - you have to monitor the predatory species and top it up if necessary. Even so, as long as the research has been done into the predator's effects, it's often a sensible and environmentally sensitive approach. You could try watering the area and see if that brings the predator out of hiding, if not, I'm afraid it's back to the shop for more snails!
Post a Comment
<< Home