Talk by Dr. Ian Bedford 7 February
Dr. Ian Bedford, bug expert, recently entertained and informed the EAGG audience with his talk on Companion Planting. These are his notes on the subject:
- Where species from both the animal and plant kingdoms are allowed to interact naturally within a habitat, they eventually create a balanced ecosystem where each species is regulated by the others that exist around it.
- Our home gardens are also able to host balanced systems by following a few simple rules and we don’t have to leave our gardens to nature to achieve this.
- Primarily, we have to stop using toxic chemicals (pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers) if we are to allow nature to flourish within our gardens and for a naturally balanced system to evolve.
- This includes using plants that have their own defence mechanisms to repel and deter pant pests from the many garden plants that don’t possess these defences. This is the concept of Companion Planting.
- Companion Plants have been used for thousands of years to protect food crops, and it is still used by many farmers in the poorer parts of the world, where it is called Push-Pull farming. Planting companion plants to push pests away from the crop and planting companion plants to pull the predators and parasitoids of the plant pests, into the crop.
- Companion Planting is more reliable within tropical climates where the environmental factors are considerably more stable than in a temperate climate zone. This is why companion planting is not widely used by commercial growers in UK.
- However, Companion Planting is something that can be experimented with in our home gardens and will be a perfect alternative to using chemicals.
- Where chemicals have been banned from use in home gardens in France, a significant increase in garden wildlife has been recorded recently. It is therefore something that we know would help Britain’s declining biodiversity to recover if we adopted the same policy and used companion planting to deal with particular problems in our gardens.