07/27/2022
For every 1 pest insect species, there are roughly 1700 beneficial insect species.
If there is a high diversity of insects in your garden, then no one pest species can ever cause excessive damage.
The ultimate pest management strategy is to attract as many predatory insects to your yard as possible.
They will eat aphids all day for free.
By allowing some aphids to exist somewhere in your garden, predatory insects like ladybugs, hover flies, lacewing, predatory wasps and more are attracted and incentivized to stay. If you have zero aphids, these predators have zero reason to be in your yard.
A common practice is to have ‘sacrificial plants’ that you never treat with even the most natural pesticide.
The ideal type, is native wild flowers.
Flowers will attract pollinators, some of whom also enjoy eating pests.
All the commotion of the pollinators will attract lots of predatory insects.
If those predators find some good food, like a bunch of aphids on a flower, they will want to stay in your yard. If they’re really happy, they may even choose to lay their eggs there, which means you’ll have even better protection next year.
By picturing the food web, this process can become more clear:
Pests insects, that feed directly on plants, are called herbivores and are at the base of the food web.
All they need to be thriving is for a plant to exist.
Predatory insects, that feed on herbivores, are higher in the food web. For a predator to exist, plants AND herbivores must exist.
If you use a pesticide that kills all the herbivore pests, the herbivores can still reappear in your garden immediately, because all they need to exist is your plants.
But the predators will take a LONG time to return. Because they have to wait for there to be a stable amount of prey available to them.
They are more vulnerable in the food web, because they exist at a higher level, relying on more variables.
Pesticides actually benefit pests overtime.
Huge pest outbreaks are easy when all the predators have been killed.
To build back the natural diverse balance takes time.
Plant flowers, plant flowers and plant flowers.
