Good Gardening is getting the right balance

Young blackbirds are voracious slug eaters!

Any garden  is ‘in balance’ when there is a productive coexistance if you like between the pests, plants and their natural predators requiring very little intervention by the gardener.

Think of your garden in layers, each of which must balance with its adjacent neighbours. Planting in layers is the simplest, but have you considered just how many layers there are? More crucially for the truly balanced garden, you need to simultaneously consider your garden’s wildlife in ‘layers’.

Just how well both these plant and wildlife layers interact with each other will determine the ultimate balance and success of your space, especially with regard to reducing and even eradicating the adverse effect of pests upon your garden environment.

Layers of planting
Layered planting is a common garden design concept and the simplest form is vertical layering – setting the taller plants towards the back of your borders. Extra interest can be added by horizontal layering – by incorporating curving paths that compel the viewer to look ahead around the corner. Surprises can be all the greater if the designer adds a tall shrub or small tree on the apex of the curve blocking the immediate view ahead

A further layer of planting focuses on time. By juxtoposing a varied planting scheme the gardener can provide extended flowering interest, ‘forcing’ some plants adds to this effect. Also, by adding plants with unusual foliage or attractive seed heads you can provide layers of added interest for year-round-pleasure.

Layers of wildlife
Consider the wildlife in your garden, both the beneficial kind and the pest varieties. These are distributed in horizontal layers from beneath the earth to around 150ft above it. Think of each layer as seperate yet dependent upon its adjacent layers.

Take the ground layer of your garden, this is occupied by two of the most diabolical pests for all gardeners – slugs and snails. Yet their destructive effect can be successfully countered by encouraging their natural predators – hedgehogs, blackbirds and thrushes – being the main oves for me. I’ve heard it said that frogs and toads will consume slugs. But in my opinion they don’t appear to have anything like the appetite for them as the three already mentioned – at least in my experience – frogs least of all in fact. You might think thrushes appear to have snails all to themselves. – They don’t! And I’ve lost count of the occasions I’ve witnessed parent Blackbirds popping young slugs in to the gaping mouths of their young. The cute-looking hedgehog will rummage through your garden mulch hungrily snaffling up any slug it encounters duing its noisy, nocturnal foraging.

For most gardens the greatest aerial predator and in my view one of the best  ‘natural assets’ of any garden are the beautiful swallows and house martins. If you can encourage these to protect your air space they will literally  ‘hoover the skies’ over your garden at the rate of around 10,000 insects per bird per day! That’s a huge number of garden pests and carriers of plant disease that simply never reach your garden. These beautiful birds will not only provide hours of entertainment they will also harry and ‘dissuade’ any predatory birds, such as kestrels, jays and magpies, waiting ready to strike at your other garden birds and their young.

In between the ground loving birds and your high-flying swallows are what I call your ‘shrub birds’. These are the birds which spend their lives hopping from shrub to shrub plucking off insects from your garden plants. They include the tits, wrens, sparrows, dunnock and such like. The various tit species love caterpillers, greenfly and aphids. Sparrows feed on the seeds of many garden weeds – docks, dandelions, grasses and buttercups. They also love weevils, aphids and caterpillers. Wrens, these tiny birds go for beetles and are able to pluck any number of small insects they spot feeding on your precious plants. While dunnocks will feast upon flies, beetles, seeds, worms and snails.

With all birds, if you can provide them with security and plentiful food they will come to stay and encourage others to join their growing commmunity in your garden. And they will do a lot of the work for you. I’ve mentioned just a few key examples that will greatly help you achieve a good balance with lasting effect.

Garden Mulch
Encouraging avian predators in to your garden is only part of a successfull campaign against slugs, snails and other garden pests. I’ve also found a thick mulch of bark chips to deter an ‘invasion of weeds’ be a key compenent to a successful balanced garden.