Wealden Times | WT226 | March 2021 | Interiors supplement inside

Garden
Pesty
Problems?
Sue Whigham gives handy tips to tackle garden pests
without harming the wildlife that feeds on them
One of my ancient greengage trees was uprooted
during one of January’s downpours and so I
thought that this was a good excuse to buy
a new self pollinating variety that might be a better
cropper than my old favourite. However, everyone else,
cooped up as we all are, has had the same thought and
our local fruit tree nursery which grows hundreds of the
most interesting varieties, hasn’t one single gage tree left
for sale this season. We’ll have to be patient and wait
until next year. What extraordinary times these are.
So the answer is to spend these dark days poring
through seed and plant catalogues and planning
ahead. I think that the ‘planning ahead’ part is
essential if the fruit trees are anything to go by.
And another thing. Having got carried away with
ordering some wonderful sweet pea seeds, there is now a
shortage of Rootrainers, my other set having seen better
days, so there’s nothing for it but to collect loo roll
holders which actually do just as good a job at starting
off long-rooted sweet peas, peas and beans alike. Let’s
hope they don’t run out again as they did during the first
lockdown and what a long time ago that now seems.
But I’m digressing because I’m supposed to be majoring
on ‘pesky critters’ in the garden, and perhaps particularly
in the vegetable patch. What a lot of them there are. I’m
not going to talk about chemicals at all because slugs and
snails and all manner of other creatures are all part of
the bigger picture and provide food for creatures further
up the food chain such as birds and hedgehogs. I read
that British gardeners still use billions of slug pellets
every year but unless they are organic, the poison enters
the food cycle and kills creatures like hedgehogs who
find both slugs and snails a gourmet treat. Interestingly,
hedgehogs don’t like ‘slimy’ slugs so they use their
paws to scrape off the slime before they tuck in.
Slugs are also food for a lot of our favourite garden
birds especially thrushes, robins and blackbirds – also
in the thrush family. They are eaten too by ground
beetles, slow worms and earthworms to name just a
few, so to do away with them completely will upset
the natural balance of things and do harm. And of the
forty species in the UK, only a few are pest species.
The problem is, I think, that many gardens are pretty
unnatural situations in which we grow non-native plants
and remove those native plants that are happy growing
away there in the first place. And the other thing is
that slugs and snails eat decomposing vegetation and
so are ecologically sound. Christopher Lloyd, when he
was writing his Country Life articles, had a sensible
piece of advice when it came to pests and that was
95 priceless-magazines.com