Release biological controls on your pests

Release biological controls on your pests and you’ll harness the power of nature to fight on your side against the creepy crawlies with designs on your plants.

Biological controls – predatory wasps, nematodes or mites which prey on our most hated garden pests – tackle pests from whitefly to red spider mite in the greenhouse, and outdoors they’ll feast on your slugs, vine weevils and caterpillars too.

You can pick them up from our garden centre here in Pickering and use them straight away as long as the soil is at least 5°C day and night for outdoor controls, or at least 10°C by night and 20°C during the day in the greenhouse. In practice, that means you can start using anti-slug controls from mid-spring, but wait until early summer before releasing greenhouse controls.

It also takes up to three weeks for them to build up their own numbers enough to become effective, so order them early and release them at the first sign of a problem so the predators are ready to tackle them as they take hold. You can still use good old-fashioned squashing to keep them at bay in the meantime – but don’t use general-purpose insecticides as they’ll kill the good bugs as well as the bad.