Gardening – Insects – eat or be eaten!

There are more than 200 million insects for every human living on Earth, mostly out of sight, yet essential for maintaining life on Earth.  

Nature is bewildering in its complexity, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the lives of insects. 

Myriads of tiny critters do their little bit to save our lives every single day – pollinating plants, gobbling up insects, providing environmental and medical services, providing food for countless other species – including a quarter of the world’s population that consumes insects. Blowflies can cleanse hard to heal wounds and mealworms can digest plastic!

In your garden, insects help keep things in order, it’s all about ‘eat or be eaten’. Think about the many kilograms of nourishment the wasp requires, most of which it gets by devouring other insects and caterpillars. Spiders, those crafty arachnids, also devour insect pests.

Insect visits to flowers contribute to seed production in more than 80 percent of the world’s wild plants.

Thousands of insects together with fungi and bacteria work to break down dead matter and transform it into new life providing the circulation of nutrients that feed our vegetables.

Insects should inspire us in their ability to contribute to our food supply through pollination, cleaning up the natural environment through decomposition, making gardening possible with soil formation and providing food for birds which help with pest control, dispersing seeds, and keeping harmful organisms in check.  

And in the future, we may be replacing beef with grasshoppers or mealworm beetles, which could provide a sustainable source of food. Insects are very nutritious. Cricket flour may contain more calcium than milk and twice as much iron as spinach. Insects have the protein content of beef with very little fat! Of course they have to be processed to transform into food for human consumption.

Insects and plants are mutually dependent and have developed in tandem, but every year we use massive amounts of chemicals and insecticides to kill them. 

There is growing documentation of the harmful effects of insecticides called neonicotinoids – perhaps it is time for us to take a more ecological approach and co-operate with, rather than fight nature in our gardening practices.

Tackling pest insects • Build healthy soil • Plant in season • Rotate crops • Interplant to confuse pests • Use floating row covers and barriers • Remove infected plants • Recognise the lifecycles of the pest insects • Develop a beneficial insect garden area with plenty of herbs to attract a diversity of insects