If there are beneficial insects in the garden, you can safely avoid all kinds of pesticides. Important criteria must be taken into account to ensure that animal protection is available to you in the fight against pests. This guide explains how you can make the busy helpers enjoy spending time in the garden.
How can I introduce beneficial insects in the garden?
To establish beneficial insects in the garden, you should avoid pesticides, use organic nutrients, create habitats such as dry stone walls, mixed hedges and piles of leaves, and set up insect hotels and bird houses. You can also use specifically bred beneficial insects such as ladybirds and lacewings.
Top premise: Chemistry is now taboo
If a garden is managed according to ecological principles, it magically attracts small and large beneficial insects. An area contaminated with artificial fertilizers and pesticides is consistently avoided by insects, birds and small animals. However, if an organic nutrient supply with compost, manure or horn shavings is at the top of the agenda, beneficial insects will not be long in coming. This is even more true if you rigorously rely on poison-free plant protection.
These habitats attract beneficial insects
If you are creating a new garden, please plan a dry stone wall. By building stone upon stone without mortar, dry retreats are created that insects, amphibians and other beneficial insects cannot resist. There are numerous options available for areas that have long been planted and overgrown so that garden helpers from the animal kingdom can settle here. The following recommendations may serve as your inspiration:
- Planting mixed hedges as a nesting and winter place
- Leave piles of leaves lying in autumn
- Insect hotels, birdhouses (€27.00 on Amazon), hanging bat boxes
- Build cat-proof hedgehog houses and place them in a protected location
- Fill flower pots with wood shavings and place them overhead
Rotten trees are invaluable for all kinds of beneficial insects. Therefore, leave one or two tree trunks lying in the garden. After a while there is more activity in it than when the tree was alive.
Increase the population of beneficial insects through purchasing
The establishment of beneficial insects in the garden can be encouraged by supplementing the recommended measures with the purchase of bred animals. Farms have specialized in this and offer larvae or adult insects that hunt pests. The advantage is that different beneficial insects target several pest species at the same time. The following examples illustrate how it works:
- Lacewing (Chrysoperla carnea): cardboard honeycombs with larvae hanging in plants against aphids, thrips, spider mites
- Nematodes Steinernema feltiae: apply in clay powder to fruit trees against codling moth
- Parasitic wasp (Encarsia formosa): fights whiteflies on crops such as tomatoes
- Ladybird: destroys aphids on ornamental and useful plants in the garden and behind glass
When purchasing ladybirds, please make sure that they are a native species, such as the two-spotted ladybird (Adalia bipunctata) or the seven-spotted ladybird (Adalia bipunctata). As a result of the introduction of the Asian lady beetle (Harmonia axyridis), the native species are threatened with extinction.
Tip
With running ducks you can settle a powerful team in the garden to scare the fear out of voracious snails. But other pests are also on their menu. In order for the flightless water birds to feel comfortable, a pond, a small stable and a head-high enclosure are required. As sociable herd animals, the lively beneficial insects cannot be expected to live a single life.
