Affordable and Reliable Gardening in Brixton

Something is eating the plants, and the usual sequence is a trip to buy a spray and an application at the weekend. In a fair proportion of cases the insect responsible has already finished and gone, the damage on show is historic, and whatever is applied hits the predators that would otherwise have dealt with it. The warm enclosed back gardens behind SW2 terraces, sheltered on all four sides and several degrees milder than open ground, run through their insect seasons early and support large populations of both the pests and the things that eat them.

Work out what it is before anything is applied

Each of the common culprits leaves a signature. Clean semicircular notches bitten from the edge of a leaf are adult vine weevil. Leaves reduced to a lace of veins are sawfly larvae. Curled, sticky new shoots crowded with small soft bodies are aphids. Ragged holes with no clean edge, and a trail, are molluscs. Holes with dark pellets nearby are caterpillars. Ten minutes with a hand lens on the underside of a leaf settles it, and the underside is where nearly everything lives.

Aphids, and the argument for doing very little

Aphid numbers explode in May because they breed faster in warm weather than their predators do. Ladybird and hoverfly larvae, lacewings and parasitic wasps follow two or three weeks behind and then clear them. Spraying at the peak resets that balance and guarantees a worse infestation in July. On a prized plant, a firm jet of water or a finger and thumb run up the shoot does the job immediately. What is worth attending to is the honeydew, which falls on everything below, turns black with sooty mould, and makes paving, furniture and car roofs under a lime or sycamore sticky for weeks; that surface is cleaned by our nearby specialists.

The beetle on the lilies

Scarlet lily beetle is unmistakable and entirely capable of stripping a lily or fritillary to bare stems within days. The adults are conspicuous; the larvae disguise themselves under a coat of their own excrement and do most of the damage. There is no subtle approach: from April to August the plants are checked every few days and the beetles and larvae removed by hand into a pot, which sounds primitive and is completely effective. A sheet of paper held under the plant catches the adults, which drop and play dead when disturbed.

Sawflies, which are not caterpillars

Sawfly larvae look like caterpillars and are treated as such, which is why so much aimed at them fails. Solomon's seal, gooseberries and roses each have their own species, and all three can defoliate a plant in under a week in early summer. The larvae feed in groups, usually on the underside of leaves low down on the plant, and removal by hand at the first sign is the practical answer. A gooseberry defoliated in June still ripens its crop, so the loss is rarely as serious as it appears.

The one that kills rather than disfigures

Vine weevil is the exception, because the adults only disfigure while the grubs kill. Plump white C-shaped grubs in the compost of a container eat the roots and the plant collapses without warning, most often in spring. Pot-grown plants, and anything in a shaded courtyard, are far more vulnerable than plants in open ground. Nematodes watered into warm moist compost in late summer are effective; so is knocking a suspect plant out of its pot and looking. Ants running up and down a stem are a related sign, since they farm aphids for honeydew and defend them, and a colony that has followed the trail indoors is a matter for local pest control in Brixton.

Where a plant is past saving

Occasionally the sensible decision is removal, particularly with a badly infested container plant whose compost is full of grubs, or a shrub that has been struggling for several seasons for other reasons. The compost is not reused and the plant is not composted on site. Where several plants and their containers are going at once, moving that material off is arranged through what the service covers.

How this fits a maintenance round

On regular visits the work is mostly observation: turning leaves over, noting what is building up and dealing with it while numbers are small, which is far quicker than any rescue. Treatments are used sparingly, at the right point in the insect's life cycle rather than when the damage is noticed, and the planting is gradually steered toward things that support predators through the year. Rounds in the neighbouring districts are covered by Clapham gardening team, and the way visits are scheduled through the season is explained on garden maintenance prices.