Gardening would be easy if nothing ever went wrong. The real test of gardening skill is when you face pressure from pests, disease & weather. One option is to just throw the strongest chemicals you’ve got at the problem, but not only is that bad for nature, it’s ultimately bad for your garden as well.
Leaving aside huge agricultural enterprises, who face different problems with different solutions (looking at you monoculture!), there is an awful lot you can do at home to create a wildlife haven & encourage your garden to thrive.
Dealing with the interconnectedness of all things: lessons from permaculture.
A few years ago I took a permaculture course (at the Permaculture Womens’ Guild if you’re interested – an extremely well put together course). For the uninitiated, permaculture is a method of design that looks at how every element of a system affects every other piece. It teaches how to use the topography of a space to move water where you want it, use the different features of plants, structures, animals to solve multiple problems & let the design work together as a unified whole.
Here’s a practical example. Say you have a cold, damp garden that’s very shaded by trees & makes it hard to grow food. The house is chilly, there’s high rainfall, everything gets muddy in winter & consequently there are a lot of slugs & snails which eat all the crops. A permaculture designer might suggest a tall south facing building with large windows up high that focus heat in to the house. A rain water collection system in the house could make use of the abundant moisture & redirect it to a passive solar-heated water tank which acts as a heat sink – holding heat & slowly releasing it through the night. More water could be diverted to a large pond which could support ducks who then eat the slugs, reducing pest pressure on crops. Sensible plant selection such as shade loving brassicas & trees such as willow which drink up a lot of water could be planted, the brassica leaves can go in to the compost to amend the soil & help it drain better, the willow can be used to make a fence to keep the ducks in. You can eat the duck eggs & use the down to make yourself a winter duvet for those cold evenings.
It’s probably not close to a perfect example, but the idea is to illustrate how you can work with what you’ve got & use the resources available to manage challenges. You get multiple benefits from each part of the system, & they work together like a network. With that in mind, let’s look an an ordinary back garden…
Pressure from pests.
Anyone who gardens will have come up against pests eating plants they’d rather weren’t eaten. Lets take slugs as an example since they’re a particular favourite of mine, but these principles work with anything that visits your garden.
Why I avoid spraying
If you want to spray to kill one kind of insect, you are going to affect other insects. There’s no way around it, there is no spray that only kills one kind of insect. You kill the bad guys, you’re going to kill the good guys. This is not a case of wanting to save the good guys because they’re good – by spraying your actually helping out the critters you’re trying to reduce.
Think about the food chain you learnt about in school. Plants are primary food sources, creatures such as slugs or aphids arrive & eat them – they are secondary consumers, then beneficial insects – tertiary consumers – come along & eat those. If you wipe out the secondary consumers such as slugs, the tertiary consumers will have nothing to eat. You end up with a power vacuum, & the first ones to fill it are going to be the creatures that eat your plants, because they have a food source & where there is something to eat nature will send something to eat it.
In this situation however, the tertiary consumers are still recovering – they don’t have an abundant food source until the pest build their number back up. Even after that it can take a little while for predators to come along. You’ve wiped them out & given the pests a leg up – it can only ever work in the short term & then you find yourself spraying again & the cycle continues in a race to the bottom.
So do we just do nothing?
Well maybe yes! Sometimes you really can just wait for the ladybird cavalry to arrive & eat all your aphids – it can happen! Remember how if there’s a food source nature will send something to eat it? It works for aphids too. However it can happen that the pests have taken over & you do need to do something. In that case I like to work from the lowest impact solution first.
- Prevention is better than cure. Pests are attracted by weak, unhealthy plants. Look after your soil, grow the right plant in the right place, keep your plants at healthy as you can, you will have far fewer problems. Growing plants at the right time & in the right conditions can have a huge effect.
- Can you change the environment to discourage pests? Slugs love to hide in shady spots like under planks or in plant pots. Rats are attracted to cooked food in compost. Have a tidy up, research the needs of the creature you’re trying to reduce & see what you can remove or change. This study from Imperial College London found that some of the best protection against carrot fly was raising the crops above where they could fly, covering with a net, & avoiding planting at the times they were most active. Sometimes the simplest methods really are the best.
- Can you change the environment to encourage predators? Slugs are eaten by wild birds, ducks, even wasps! Can you encourage these in to your garden with a shrub to hide in, a bird table, or by not removing that wasps’ nest as long as it’s not bothering anyone? Cut a hedgehog hole in your fence – they eat slugs!
- Don’t create a monoculture! Plant lots of different things. Provide a range of habitats such as wood piles, long grass, water & mud. If you don’t have time to plan out an elaborate garden, just plant the widest variety you can. If something wants to eat your roses you’ll have plenty of other plants left, some of which will hopefully be hosting predators. You don’t need to know everything about every plant, but it’s worth remembering that even predators have preferences about where they mate, have babies & spend winter. Let some weeds grow if you can.
- If the predators aren’t coming on their own you can conscript them. This is a technique known as Integrated Pest Management. There are companies that will fly drones over your garden dropping predatory mites, but also companies that sell nematodes that kill fungus gnats for £10 a go. They’ll do their thing & then the population will dwindle as the food source depletes. Nature will take its course & you won’t have introduced a poison in to the food chain.
Know your enemy
A little bit of knowledge really does go a long way. Some pests such as fungus gnats are best attacked as a certain stage in their development, some at a certain time of year. In the US there is a critter called Japanese Beetle which destroys roses among other things. They’re also very fond of Pelargoniums which happen to contain something that paralyses them. Some rose growers are starting to plant Pelargoniums which are in flower earlier in the year, the beetles flock to them & are then easily dispatched as they can be found lying on the floor after stuffing themselves.
Nature is wild & varied. There is always something around the corner waiting to eat you. Armed with this knowledge & a bit of googling, I’m confident that there’s no pest pressure you can’t solve!
Pressure from disease
I’ll reiterate what I said about pests: healthy plants are less attractive. This is really the single most likely thing to stop your plants getting eaten, but how do you maintain healthy plants?
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Don’t let soil sit uncovered. Topsoil is a delicate ecosystem & erosion from wind & rain, compaction & sun baking can really damage it. Grow a ground cover, mulch with anything from bark chips to compost. Cover. Your. Soil.
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Minimise digging. Plants need nutrients, water & oxygen, all of which they get through their roots. Earthworms & other creatures create networks air tunnels in the ground. Mycorrhizal fungi join with plants’ roots in a symbiotic relationship which gives the roots an extended reach of up to 2/3rds (a fact from Jeff Lowenfel’s book ‘Teaming With Microbes’ – a surprisingly readable deep dive in to the world of soil microorganisms). Digging destroys these networks & damages a plant’s chances. For more than you ever needed to know about the no dig method, check out Charles Dowding’s YouTube channel.
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Feed the soil not the plant. Chemical fertilisers are made up of nutrients called nitrates. These are a form of nitrogen that are ready for plants to absorb – sounds great right?! The problem is that plant roots aren’t the only thing in the soil.
Without added fertilisers, plants get their nutrients through the soil food web. Vegetative matter dies & falls on to the soil providing nitrogen in the form of nitrites which plants can’t absorb. Creatures like worms & beetles as well as many microorganisms pull these down & eat them, pooping them out & converting the nitrites in to nitrates which the plant uses as food.
If you only add artificial fertiliser, you cut out everything in the food web apart from plants. Gradually the life in the soil depletes & you’re left with a barren dustbowl.
Educating yourself about soil is really one of the best places to start if you want to garden with nature. For example, many people spray fungicides on to roses to deal with black spot, but once you know there are fungi in the soil that are crucial for plant health, do you think spraying a fungicide around your plants is a good idea? In a garden everything is interconnected. You kill one thing with poison, you’re going to harm something else unintentionally.
If you really must spray to save the life of your plant, now at least you know it must be carefully targeted on the leaves & kept to a bare minimum. You can also use something such as a baking soda mix which is less potent but works well in conjunction with other techniques. You might be able to find alternative methods – remove diseased leaves, disinfect your tools, mulch heavily to supress any spores that have fallen to the soil, ensure good airflow. We’re back to the ‘change the environment’ solution we encountered with pest control. It’s all the same approach.
This post will not have the answers to every question, I don’t have the scope here to offer a solution for every disease you might encounter, but I hope that in describing a small part of this approach it’ll give you the tools to research in the right area & help you avoid any pitfalls. I am also learning all the time!
Pressure form weather
In many ways this is the hardest pressure to deal with, because what can you do about weather?! This year we had a horrendously wet & cold summer, my plants suffered, things didn’t flower, fungal diseased & mould were rife, I lost seedling to saturated compost. You can plan for weather, you can cover things, open & close windows, use grow lights, the list goes on, it’s still going to beat you round the head occasionally.
I suppose what I’m saying, & this applies to all three pressures really, is that when you’re gardening with nature sometimes things are simply going to be out of your control, & you might have to accept it. We are not manicuring golf courses here. Weeds are good for wildlife, sometimes the ladybirds will arrive too late & the aphids have taken over, box moth might decimate your hedges & you have to pull them all out & plant Yew instead. Do your best, roll with the punches & be willing to redefine the words ‘tidy’, ‘relaxing’ & even ‘beautiful’.
A change of mind
I hope all this has been useful, & if you take away one thing from this post I really hope it’s not a life hack. Wildlife gardening is about changing the way you relate to the slice of nature you’re a guardian of. Nature does a brilliant job – but we don’t have to live in a completely wild, uncontrolled landscape. There is room for gardening in a sustainable future, but if we want to primp & fettle we need to do it in a way that nature recognises as part of it, not as an outside force imposing our will on everything around us.
Do you have a wildlife success or failure to share? Leave a message in the comments so we can all learn from your experience!
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