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| Read on to find out why I was excited to see this guy |
At the Narrandera Food Garden we are trying to adopt permaculture principles into our gardening practices. Permaculture is all about working with nature to achieve an end goal that is beneficial for all. This means trying to encourage natural pollinators and pest control agents, rather than poisoning our environment, ourselves, and all those ‘good’ bugs (and the things that eat them!) out there by using pesticides and herbicides.
We live in a very chemical-based society, and it’s so easy to get caught up in thinking that we have to use pesticides and herbicides all the time to get rid of weeds and pests. However, this over-reliance on chemical controls has been proven to result in not only the loss of plants, insects and animals that can help us control the ‘bad guys’ but also to create environments that encourage weed growth and pest attacks (invasive weeds are the first to encroach on bare ground after weed spraying, due to the lack of competition; and loss of predatory insects, due to broad-scale pesticide use, can give the pest species that emerge later free reign). Agricultural scientists are also finding that weed and pest species are developing resistances to commonly-used pesticides and herbicides, making them less effective, and forcing chemical control companies to develop ever more potent poisons. The end result of this cycle is a higher and higher reliance on chemical controls as we steadily remove harmless and beneficial species from our gardens and crops, and more and more chemicals going on and into our food, soil, water and air. The only winners in this cycle are the chemical companies.
