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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

be compromised by the combined herbivore stress of millions of tiny grubs munching away at the leaves, but we managed a good harvest from the park last September.I also noticed the litter strewn around the park. Now, this isn't local yobs leaving their beer cans

it beside its smaller relative: the lesser stag beetle, Dorcus parallelipipedus. Like the 'true' stag beetle, Lucanus cervus, it has grubs that feed in fallen logs, but it reaches adulthood in only one or two years, rather than three to seven. Neither sex

and sour-tasting berries. This latter is the more famous tree, however, because (as every schoolchild knows) it provides about the only food that a silkworm will tolerate. The grubs feed on the mulberry leaves before wrapping themselves into cocoons made

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