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 2 Comments

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