As you suggest, petroleum and chemical based detergents can be more harmful than many pesticides. The surfactants are extremely resilient and tough to break down in the environment, whilst anti-bacterial soaps will decimate the vital micro-organisms in your soil. As well as soft soap you can safely ...

My garden has recently been infested with thousands of pollen beetles - small flying beetles that make for blooms to eat the pollen. Apparently they fly from oil seed rape fields. Can I ask, will they strip the blossom off my beans and peas, or are they just a nuisance and an eysore - does anyone k...

Hi Snip, Pollen beetles are always about in large numbers at this time of the year, and particularly in areas where Oil Seed Rape is being grown. We have them feeding on the pollen of virtually everything that is in flower right now. They are completely harmless though, and, like many other beetles,...

Only little worry is, its obvioulsy making a nest in there, so will it lay loads of eggs which will hatch & will I find a swarm in the green house later on!! I've always been fond of leaf-cutters and I don't mind the little circles that they cut - The Amelanchiers seem to be their favourite - b...

I'm going to put some bran out in one or two places to see if that works. I've been hearing a lot of good things about Bran as a mollusc killer just recently - apparently it came out tops in a Gardeners World trial a couple of years ago. It seems it definitely attracts them like moths to a flame &a...

Looking forward to making (and freezing) a big batch of cordial this weekend - the Elderflowers are at their absolute peak here right now and with no rain in prospect I guess they'll go over fairly quickly.

Thunderstorms now forecast for this Sunday down here - keeping fingers and toes crossed for some rain to come with them!

Re ground beetles: If you have any their numbers will be reduced when they fall into beer traps and drown. Hi Alan, We don't have the benefits of ducks to do our slug work here unfortunately, but we are lucky enough to have a huge diversity of invertebrates in our garden, including lots of ground b...

Hi Galatea, Wildlife do not hoover up the pellets. The pellets are more resilient to rain than you are suggesting and there is nothing in an organic slug pellet to harm a pet or any wild life should they manage to eat some. Try treating a 5 acre plot with Nematodes and the net cost would be that it...

I also agree with a lot of the methods here. I prefer not to kill them if I can though and have had a lot of success in the past with granite shards. At least they're also safe for my kids who are always messing about in the garden, and other wildlife too. The Eco-Charlie make is a good one, I thin...

Almost certainly these are slow release fertiliser granules - your description fits them precisely and they are routinely used in the production of bedding plants, amongst others. It's one of the most common queries that people have with potted plants, most assume they are some kind of snail egg sin...

11mm is better than nothing - which is what we've had here for weeks now! The river is reduced to a trickle and you can easily walk right across the river bed in "normal" shoes, which I don't recall happening for many years....and it's only June

Hi John, This is their natural re-growth habit after they've taken severe damage - they have evolved to combat wildfire in Australia. We have a dozen Eucalypts here, and all of them were completely defoliated by this last winter. The ones that are not dead to the ground are now re-shooting just as y...

It never ceases to amaze me how far Toads will travel and wander considering that they're not really built for land-locomotion - even if they do spend most of the year out of the water. We regularly get them popping up at the front door particularly on damp evenings when I guess they're out slug hun...

Great Crested Newts are also far bigger/bulkier and much darker, near black in comparison to Palmate Newts, particularly at this time of the year. Of course they are also a heavily protected endangered species and it's illegal to interfere with or disturb one of them.