Garden Tips & Tricks

The earwig doesn't climb into your ears. That's a myth that's been going for centuries. What it does do is eat your aphids while you sleep. 🌿

What's worth knowing:

It's nocturnal. It comes out at night to hunt aphids, psyllids, mites, slug eggs and small caterpillars — exactly the pests that go after roses, fruit trees and the veg patch.

Its pincers don't hurt people. The rear pincers are for defence and for gripping prey, not for piercing anything. The male's are curved; the female's are straight.

It is double-edged, to be fair. It will occasionally notch a petal or nibble very ripe fruit, and it can be a minor nuisance on dahlias and clematis. But that damage is small set against the work it does clearing aphids.

It's an exceptional mother. The female lays a clutch of eggs and cleans them one by one with her mouth to keep mould off, then guards her young after they hatch — maternal care that's genuinely rare among insects.

How to make use of it: set an upturned pot stuffed with straw on a cane at the foot of a rose or fruit tree. The earwig shelters there during the day. If a plant is overrun with aphids, move the pot next to it — that same night it'll get to work.

Next time one darts off under a pot, let it go and do its job 🐛

The perfect English lawn — green, close-cut, uniform — is really a small desert. Mown short every week, it never lets anything flower: no flowers means no nectar, and no nectar means no bees, butterflies or hoverflies. And yet this is exactly where any of us can make a difference, with about the easiest change there is.

The single most powerful thing you can do is simple: mow less. Let the grass grow a little and the lawn's own wild flowers — clover, dandelion, daisies, speedwell — come back into bloom. The findings are clear: a lawn cut once a month instead of every week can produce many times more nectar, and easing off the mowing brings a marked rise in the number of pollinators visiting.

It doesn't mean abandoning the garden. The best recipe is a mosaic: keep the edges, paths and thoroughfares mown regularly — so it still reads as tidy and intentional — and leave some inner areas longer, cutting them just once or twice a year after flowering, and removing the clippings.

This isn't an idea for eccentric gardeners. Reduced mowing is now mainstream: councils across the UK have cut back verge and park mowing for wildlife, and Plantlife's No Mow May has taken the message into millions of gardens. As the organisers put it, long grass doesn't mean neglect.

A common worry: doesn't long grass just mean more pests? In practice more biodiversity also brings more of the natural predators that keep them in check. And on top of that, fewer cuts means less noise, less petrol, less CO2, and a lawn that stands up to drought far better.

A flowering lawn isn't an unkempt lawn. It's a living one 🌼