Rewilding - A Contentious Issue

By RACHEL BUDD

April is going to be a good month in the garden. Spring has been difficult this year, in the way that seems to be becoming commonplace, with a good dry February which is really too early to get started in the garden, followed by a very wet March which delays us yet again. So April it is. The season starts here.

Now is the time to get your potatoes planted, Earlies first, followed by maincrop in a few weeks’ time. You can plant potatoes as late as the end of May and still get a good crop so don’t panic over them. You do need to get onion sets in the ground though as quickly as possible though as they won’t bulb up nicely if planted too late in April.

Seedlings in module trays should be coming along nicely now and can be sown throughout April. Later sowings often catching up and overtaking earlier ones. Tomatoes and peppers must be growing strongly now to have a long enough season for a good harvest.

April is also the month for sowing wild flower seed and in recent years there has been increasing interest in creating patches of vividly coloured annual flowers that admittedly look beautiful. There is a problem however. These flowers are not wild, they are often not even native to Ireland, with common mixes containing Cosmos from South Africa and Calendula from the Mediterranean amongst others. So be careful what mix you pick up.

While there is a small benefit to some pollinator species in sowing these flowers there is an irony in the destruction of a natural ecosystem containing networks of plants and insects in symbiotic relationships with each other to produce a fake environment for one or two bee species. Biodiversity is about far more than just pollinators. Just as not all pollinators are insects, not all insects are pollinators, and by removing the existing vegetation, we are breaking a food web and natural cycle, from soil based bacteria, fungal networks, macro and microorganisms, to insects living their larval stage deep in long grass and the stems of wild plants such as nettles, plantains, dandelions etc. Including 3 of our most loved butterflies. If we remove these natural environments in order create fake ones that are just more colourful, we have supplied some pollen for adult butterflies but have removed the plants needed for them to lay their eggs and for the caterpillars to survive. The result of this is less and less butterflies each year.

The removal of habitats for a wide variety of insect life also impacts on bird species. Many of our small birds rely on the larval stage of insects as their main food source. How many birds eat bees? So our over emphasis on pollinator plants is costing us our bird population. For those of you old enough, remember back to when you were a child running through long grass, do you remember the clouds of insects flying up as you disturbed the grass? If you are a young person, have you ever experienced that?

We don’t know what we have lost until it is gone, and the sad thing is that our children never knew it existed in the first place. How can they be expected to protect what is no longer there?