Precious insects - 10+ simple things you can do to turn your garden into a haven for insects

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.As a gardener, you can do a lot to provide much-needed food and habitat to pollinators and other insects. Many of the following ideas require less of an effort than you might be putting in at the moment!

• Make your garden a pesticide-free zone. (If you have a plant that is constantly infested with pests it is probably not happy in your garden - try replacing it with something else.)
• Reimagine weeds as wildflowers - the difference between a flower and a weed is a judgment.
• Mow your lawn less often to let flowers pop up.
• Designate a "wild corner" where you do nothing whatsoever.
• Most conventional nursery plants contain pesticides. Buy from an organic nursery, grow your own plants from seeds or plant-swap with other gardeners instead.
• Plant pollinator-friendly flowers (such as lavender, rosemary, marjoram, comfrey, thyme, catmint, hardy geraniums - but not pelargoniums) or sow a wildflower meadow with flowers native to your region.
• Plant a flowering tree (apple, cherry, willow, lime...)
• Create a compost heap.
• Make a log pile or a brash pile (from other parts of trees and shrubs you have chopped off, such as twigs and leaves.)
• Avoid annual bedding plants (such as busy-lizzies, begonias, petunias, pansies) because they are bred in a way that makes them pretty useless for insects.
• Stay away from double varieties of roses, cherries, hollyhocks and aquilegia because they are mutants that produce extra petals instead of pollen.
• Remove any unnecessary sources of light from your garden. They disorient insects, disturb their hormonal clock and make them easy prey.

Random insect fact: Metamorphosing insects are the world's most successful ones - just four groups of them make up 65% of all known species on the planet (flies, bees/ants/wasps, butterflies/moths, beetles).

Are your reading this in the cold season? Find out what you can do for insects in the winter!

Source: Dave Goulson, Silent Earth - Averting the Insect Apocalypse