Natural Pest Control for Your Garden
The best form of pest control is to use nature’s own checks and balances to keep pest numbers down. There are several ways in which you can ensure these checks and balances are in place, allowing you to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor instead of relying on potentially harmful pesticides to deal with any problems.
It’s important to remember that there aren’t armies of pests waiting to get hold of your prized vegetables the minute you’ve planted them. Bad weather and poor growing methods such as overcrowding are more likely to ruin your crop. However, the pests most likely to damage your vegetables are birds (which also eat many garden pests), slugs and snails.
Creating an ecosystem
However small your garden or vegetable plot, it should have a self-regulating ecosystem in place to control pests and keep your plants healthy. The simplest way to create this ecosystem is to plant a range of plants which attract natural predators that feed on pests. Ideally, these plants should provide food (in the form of nectar, fruit and pollen) and shelter for predators and sacrificial crops to maintain pest colonies. A sacrificial crop could be a clump of nettles. This will harbor aphids which will feed predators such as ladybirds and lacewings. If any aphids then attack your crops, the ladybirds and lacewings will be on standby to clear them up.
If you have room, a pond (even a very small pond) is useful for keeping pest numbers down. It will encourage frogs (which eat slugs) and bats (which eat mosquitoes and other flying insects). If the pond has a shallow area, it will also provide water for mammals such as hedgehogs (which eat slugs).
The following common predators keep pest numbers in check:
- Birds eat slugs, snails, grubs, wireworms, caterpillars and insects
- Frogs and Toads eat slugs, snails and various insects
- Ladybugs and lacewings eat aphids such as blackfly and whitefly
You can attract various predators to your plot with a few simple planting techniques. A few bird feeders will encourage more birds on to your plot. A nesting box or wild patch will encourage hedgehogs. Lacewings and ladybugs can be encouraged to visit by planting candytuft, sunflowers and marigolds (see our full article on Flowers for Vegetable Gardens for a detailed illustrated guide).
Regular inspections
It is important to check your vegetables for pests on a regular basis. A small clump of aphids on your broad beans is nothing to worry about (a healthy plant will shrug off the pests as we might deal with a cold), but if it becomes an infestation, you need to remove it. Simply rub the aphids off the plants with your fingers, or blast them with a jet from your hose. If the infestation is only small, leave it there. Predators will soon hone in on the pests and lay their eggs. For example, lacewing and ladybird larvae can eat as many as 150 aphids per day and produce new generations to control your pests next year.