Pests, Predators, Weeds and Saviours: Part 1

Warm weather, warm soil, rain, sunshine all make the garden grow. The downside is all that young tender growth makes tasty meals for a whole host of pests and is as good for weeds to grow in as it is for ornamentals and vegetables.

So, are you prepared to do battle for another year? Hopefully you have your army of allies in place already; if not what can you do?

I suppose your first decision is whether to choose chemical or organic. If you’ve always been chemical and are alarmed by the decreasing number available to you, or if you’re not sure if you’re ready to become fully organic, you could try an integrated scheme, where you use organic, cultural, biological methods first and move onto chemical later if / when you need to. (Officially known as IPM or integrated pest management).

Let’s consider a fairly informal interpretation of IPM as being that most likely to appeal to most people.

I’m assuming that your soil is in good heart to begin with, full to bursting with organic matter and friendly worms. By ensuring your plants are healthy, they’re more able to fight off attacks by pests, and survive. It doesn’t stop the weeds, unfortunately; although a bed full of nettles is a sign that the soil is healthy!

Just in case you’re still confused, annual weeds germinate, flower, set seed and die once or many times over the growing season. Examples are Shepherds purse, chickweed. So although they may come up year after year, you can get rid of them (until the birds drop some more seeds…) Perennials are longer lived and tend to have a tap root which goes deep into the ground, enabling them to over winter. Bindweed and dandelion are two examples.

Interestingly, many of the plants we call weeds are useful culinary and medicinal plants and have been used as such for hundreds of years. They have also provided us with many of the ornamental garden plants we love through cultivation and breeding.

For weeds, our casual IPM could mean cultural methods of hoeing or picking out annual weeds while still small and doing one’s best to dig out the worst of the perennials. The perennials are the point at which many people understandably call in the marines (sorry, I mean the chemicals). The problem is often avoiding spraying the plants you do want when you have horsetail in between your salvias and bindweed clinging to your clematis. The answer there is start earlier if you’re going to spray or paint on a systemic weed killer, or indeed use a more organic version such as strong vinegar. So maybe that’s for next year. What may help a little is to plant a good sized, strong, ground covering ornamental or productive plant as soon as you’ve dug up the mass of perennial weeds. It won’t stop them, but it may slow them down by increasing the competition.

Where you have fewer, possibly specimen plants, or under shrubs, laying down mulch will reduce weed seeds germinating and slow down perennials by creating a barrier. Mulches can be organic, such as bark or compost, or inorganic such as pebbles or membrane.

Pests come in many shapes and sizes…

Encouraging beneficial insects into the garden is a positive way to reduce pests and, once you’ve done the encouraging bit, should mean a lot less work for you! It doesn’t mix so well with most chemicals, so do be careful and read instructions if you need to use them; for example, some can be sprayed on flowering plants in the evening and the residue has gone by the morning so the bees are less affected.

To be continued…