PREDATORS ON YOUR PLOT

Garden Organic's Anton Rosenfeld explores the range of beneficial predators that you can encourage into your garden, keeping pests at bay

- Anton Rosenfeld

A healthy garden is a complex system with many interactions hanging in the balance. As gardeners, we're often concerned with the balance between 'pests', the creatures that eat our garden plants, and 'predators', the creatures that eat the pests and keep them under control.

Insects play a huge role in maintaining this balance and it's useful to learn to recognise some of these key predators so you can protect and nurture them. Beyond the insect world, there are many other creatures that predate on insect pests. A brood of blue tits can consume up to 1000 caterpillars a day, frogs will also make an important contribution.

Annihilate everything with a toxic chemical spray, and the pests will multiply quicker with nothing left to keep them in check. So how do we maintain a balance that is favourable for a gardener? It's also important to adapt our organic gardening practices to tackle them without harming them.

KEY INSECT PREDATORS 

LADYBIRDS: One of the most conspicuous of the predators but their larvae, which have purple-grey and yellow markings, are not so widely recognised. They certainly deserve more credit, as they will consume around 100 aphids a day, twice as much as the adults and will also eat thrips and spider mites. As they can't fly, they will stay feeding in the same place, unlike their adult counterparts, who like to take off and disperse.