Better a bite than poison: how we at Stadsjochies deal with insects in the garden.
02/09/26
At Stadsjochies, we don’t use chemical pesticides. 🌱 That’s a conscious choice, because we believe it’s important to have plenty of biodiversity in our gardens. And where there’s life, little creatures are bound to appear. Some of them are less welcome than others: they like to help themselves to our harvest. How do we deal with this without using poison? In this blog, we’ll take you through our approach.
Our methods for keeping out unwanted visitors
We have various natural ways of protecting our crops: we use netting to literally keep insects out. For example, we’ve placed nets over the brassicas to protect them from the cabbage white butterfly. Not to keep all insects out – after all, insects are part of a healthy ecosystem – but to prevent as much damage as possible in a natural way.
We encourage natural predators, such as hedgehogs and birds, which in turn eat the insects that attack our plants. This is how nature keeps itself more or less in balance. And sometimes the simplest solution is the best: we simply remove the pests by hand. A good example of this is the Colorado beetle affecting our potatoes, which we’ll discuss in more detail a little later on.
A hole in the leaf? That’s perfectly fine!
What we don’t do is try to keep out all insects completely. Not only is that impossible, but we don’t want to do it either. Ultimately, we’re more concerned with sustainability, biodiversity and healthy plants than with perfect, undamaged leaves. So if the odd leaf gets nibbled now and then, we don’t mind. Better a little hole than poison.
That also means that our harvests can sometimes be disappointing or even fail completely. That’s all part and parcel of choosing a natural approach, and it’s a price we’re happy to pay for a garden teeming with life.
The potato and its greatest enemy: the Colorado potato beetle.
Would you like to know how much love and dedication it takes to grow potatoes? We’ve got a whole field full of them. On average, one potato plant yields about one kilo of potatoes, but it doesn’t happen by itself.
Our biggest natural enemy in this regard is the Colorado potato beetle. This beetle lays its eggs on the leaves of the potato plant, and the larvae that hatch from them then completely strip the leaves bare. Without intervention, this would jeopardise the entire harvest.
The Colorado beetle!
The problem with the Colorado potato beetle is that it has virtually no natural enemies. This is because the leaves of the potato plant are slightly poisonous, so birds tend to avoid the beetles that feed on them. Nets or hedgehogs are therefore of no help here.
As we don’t use any pesticides, there’s only one option left: by hand. Our growers walk through the field and remove the beetles from the leaves one by one. It’s painstaking work, but it pays off. This year, we’ve managed to keep the beetles at bay as much as possible, and the potato harvest has been a success.
Choosing nature, with everything that goes with it.
Our approach requires patience, manual labour and, now and then, accepting a disappointing harvest. But in return, you get a garden teeming with life: insects, birds and hedgehogs – all of which are part of it. For us, that is the essence of sustainable gardening at Stadsjochies.