If you want to cultivate your garden as naturally as possible, you can fortunately count on some animal helpers. These support you both in pest control and in soil improvement. We introduce you to three of the hardest-working little helpers.
Ladybugs keep aphids and scale insects away
Pest decimation and soil enhancement
Pest control and soil improvement are the key areas where animal helpers can save you work in the garden. In addition to birds and microorganisms, these are mainly insects and worms. Very diligent and effective are, for example:
- ladybug
- parasitic wasps
- worms
ladybug
In addition to their pest-killing properties, the dotted, spherical beetles also have a very positive symbolic meaning - as messengers from the Mother of God, as the patron saint of children or simply as a lucky charm. In the garden, they are particularly useful because of their large appetite for aphids and scale insects. In addition to these very common pests, which often occur in large numbers, they also eat spider mites, bugs or sawfly larvae. Conveniently, some species also feed on powdery mildew and mold.
A lady beetle can eat up to 50 aphids a day. The Asian "Harlequin" lady beetle is particularly effective, which is why it was brought to Europe from Asia and is used in commercial nurseries for biological plant protection.
parasitic wasps
The parasitic wasps, which are only about 5-10 mm in size (€22.99), are offered in the egg stage in specialist shops and on the Internet explicitly for pest control. They mainly target whiteflies, leaf miners, aphids, cabbage whiteflies, spider moths and moths such as the European corn borer or the codling moth. They are also used indoors against food and clothes moths. Ichneumon wasps destroy pests by parasitizing them: they lay their eggs in the host animals, which serve as food for the larvae that later hatch - they eat them up from the inside.
worms
Earthworms are among the best soil conditioners out there. On the one hand, they dig through and mix up the soil by crawling underground, which aerates it, loosens it and opens it upwards for better water penetration.
They also transport plant remains from upper to lower layers of the earth in order to eat them there. In doing so, they carry out the organic decomposition process of the compost heap in turbo mode. Their excretions are the best long-term fertilizer imaginable: it contains a great many nutrients that can be used on the surface of the earth, because the worms deposit their piles of excrement at the upper tunnel exits.