Wildlife houses that encourage natural garden pest control

Bringing beneficial wildlife in your backyard will help control mosquitoes, ants, slugs and snails, as well as pollinating vegetables and fruit trees for bountiful crops. And, while providing food will attract these helpful creatures, providing habitat will keep them in your garden and support their life cycle, ensuring sustainable, natural epidemic control for the coming years.

Birds like swallows, martins and bluebirds are aerial insectivores, meaning they are extremely adept at catching food on the wing – and mozzies are on their menu. Bats also eat a huge amount of mosquitoes. And even a tiny house will eat up to a thousand bugs and spiders a day.

Toads also have a huge appetite for garden pests, and estimates suggest that a single toad will eat over a hundred slugs, snails and insects each night. And while toads must visit a pond to breed, this amphibian can live up to three miles from a water source, so it provides a moist, shady home and one can move around and keep the slug and snail population in check in your garden.

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Ladybugs are incredibly effective at controlling aphids, another common garden pest. An adult ladybug eats about 50 aphids a day, and their larvae devour twice that amount. Add bees and butterflies, both to pollinate vegetable plants and to be part of the food chain to feed birds, and you’ll create a backyard ecosystem that will naturally take care of your garden’s pest control. This is a benefit, especially if you organic garden so you don’t want to use chemical solutions.