Spring WILDLIFE

Striving for a healthy crop of vegetables & wildlife

Adrian Thomas looks at ways to live in harmony with garden wildlife while growing fruit and veg

Last year, the carrots in my raised bed failed. Completely. Not a single one made it to the table.

Isowed early, they germinated but they had barely got their first leaves above the surface before they disappeared. I tried again and again –same result every time.

I found out, too late, that the culprits were wood mice that had burrowed down the side of the bed and for whom fresh carrot shoots were apparently their delicacy of choice. Why, oh why, couldn’t they take all the unwanted chickweed and goosefoot seedlings coming up at the same time instead?!

I’m sure that all of you who grow fruit and veg have your own tales of battles with nature, of powerful adversaries who test your patience as you try to fend off their unrelenting attacks. The list of problem species is long: aphids, whitefly, wood pigeons, carrot fly, large white and small white butterflies, slugs, snails, mealybugs, cabbage root fly, rabbits, deer, foxes, pea moths, flea beetles… I could go on. It is so easy to denounce wildlife as Enemy Number One.

But of course, there are many, many more species of wildlife that are no problem at all, or indeed are beneficial to our gardens. We need wildlife if we are to grow successful crops –we need the services of pollinators for a great deal of our fruit, and the action of worms and other beneficial invertebrates to ensure that our soil is healthy.

And in this nature-depleted world, it seems right to aim for a veg patch that helps support wildlife, rather than rendering yet another piece of our planet’s surface sterile.

The truth is that it is absolutely possible to combine wildlife and food-growing – they are not mutually exclusive. Those who have gardened organically for decades are proof of that. So, what is the trick to growing fruit, vegetables and wildlife at the same time?

The first thing is to take a few moments to look objectively at what we tend to do when we grow crops. Let’s use cabbages as an example. Most of us plant them in rows, and then we zealously get rid of every other plant that might compete with them by weeding. It seems the most efficient way of growing food, but doing this also means we create mass monocultures.

The result is easy to predict. Imagine what a cabbage white butterfly must think when it chances upon this feast. It lives to find cabbages to lay its eggs on, so