If you want to cultivate your garden as naturally as possible, you can fortunately count on some animal helpers. These support you in both pest control and soil improvement. We introduce you to three of the hardest-working helpers.
Which animals help with pest control and soil improvement in the garden?
Ladybirds, parasitic wasps and earthworms are useful helpers in the garden: ladybirds eat aphids and other pests, parasitic wasps parasitize and destroy various types of pests, and earthworms improve soil quality through aeration and fertilization.
Pest decimation and soil improvement
Pest control and soil improvement are the key areas in which animal helpers can save you work in the garden. In addition to birds and microorganisms, these are primarily insects and worms. For example, people who are very hardworking and effective are:
- Ladybug
- Parasitic wasps
- Earthworms
Ladybug
In addition to their pest-destroying properties, the spotted, spherical beetles also have a very positive symbolic meaning - as messengers of the Mother of God, as the patron saint of children or simply as a good luck charm. They are particularly useful in the garden because of their large appetite for aphids and scale insects. In addition to these very common and often large-scale pests, they also destroy spider mites, bedbugs and sawfly larvae. Some species also conveniently feed on mildew and mold.
A ladybird can eat up to 50 aphids a day. The Asian - "Harlequin" ladybird is particularly effective, which is why it was specifically imported to Europe from Asia and is used in commercial gardening for biological plant protection.
Parasitic wasps
The parasitic wasps, which are only around 5-10 mm in size, are offered in the egg stage in specialist shops and on the Internet explicitly for pest control. They primarily target the whitefly, the leaf miner, aphids, the cabbage whitefly, web moths and butterflies such as the corn borer or the codling moth. In the house they are also used against food and clothes moths. Parasitic wasps destroy pests by parasitizing them: They lay their eggs in the host animals, which serve as food for the larvae that later hatch - so they eat them from the inside.
Earthworms
Earthworms are among the best soil improvers ever. On the one hand, they dig through and mix the soil through their underground crawling activity, which aerates it, loosens it and opens it upwards for better penetration of water.
They also transport plant remains from upper to deeper layers of the earth in order to eat them there. In doing so, they essentially carry out the organic decomposition process of the compost heap in a turbo cycle. Their excreta is the best permanent fertilizer you can imagine: It contains a lot of nutrients that can be used on the surface of the earth, because the worms deposit their droppings at their upper tunnel exits.
