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, that badgers and birds won't dig up looking for grubs, that dogs won't ruin with their scorch marks. And worm casts? What worm casts? Lawn life as we know it replaced by a carpet of convenient, sterile 'turf' -  like paving slabs in disguise.But what is a

the leaves young avoids ending up with a salad full of grubs.So far, I've just two pots of bare soil - one decorated with a wigwam of pea sticks - but it won't be long before shoots start to emerge. Adam Pasco and I will be blogging again about the progress

wing-tip to wing-tip is striped orange and white and quite pretty under a lens.It had been spreading across Europe from its first discovery in Macedonia in the middle of the 20th century and arrived in the UK in Wimbledon in 2002. I first noticed

these wonderful creatures in my back garden. South London is now about the only place in the UK where you can regularly see these awesome monsters. My supposition is that when the housing boom spread across the area 100 to 150 years ago, it was one of the most

underwear). It takes about 1500 cocoons to make a pound of silk.In the 19th century there was the equivalent of a gold rush over mulberries in the United States. There was massive speculation and excitement about growing mulberry trees and the long

fighting back. The eggs hatch and the ichneumon grubs then eat the insect alive, from the inside. Although they are amongst the most important of biological control agents, they are incredibly poorly studied; the few identification guides are highly

everywhere. A few years ago I cleared out the small window boxes of the dead and dying plants that were clearly not doing very well. All I found, instead of roots, were lots of these small (7-8mm) creamy white maggots — vine weevil grubs.The adult weevils

home there. Don't straighten the log pile or alphabetise the flower pots; don't deadhead all the seed capsules or cut back all the wilting leaves; don't fell all the dead wood or grub up the old stump. Instead, leave straggly bits of long grass, leave

(protein) is fed to the bees at grub stage and can determine the bees' overall size and health. Highly bred plant cultivars tend to have been bred for their size, scent, appearance or disease resistance, so nectar quality can often be poor. Grow leguminous

the top layer of soil, replace it with fresh, home-made compost and give all the plants a good water. Any vine weevil grubs will be dispatched to the blackbird, and the thyme replaced with some garlic chives, which I'm ready to plant out. I'll prune out