What is Biological Control?

Biological pest control is all about introducing natural predators and parasites to control garden pests. In a natural ecosystem nearly every creature is food for something else and biological pest control is the act of boosting the population of a pest’s naturally occurring predators.

Big bugs have little bugs by Jonathan Swift
Big bugs have little bugs
Upon their backs to bite them.
Little bugs have littler bugs.
And so, ad infinitum.

Because these predators are already all around us they are completely safe to children, pets and native wildlife and in fact many of them are invisible to the naked eye.

At Ladybird Plantcare we believe that the long term goal should be to understand and work with our natural environment rather than introducing chemical pesticides and poisons which may have unintended consequences. Keeping plant pests under control in a planetfriendly way is no easy feat and because it is such a delicate balance sometimes it can take a little while for the introduction of new controls to take hold. However with threats to the native bird and bee population so critical now there is even more reason to work with nature rather than against it.