Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

This is a good weekend to get into the garden and plan ahead for crops and fruit...and gratis pest control. Fruit Trees and crops need pollinators. It pays to always have a mixture of useful pollen and nectar sources flowering when you want to attract pollinators to your garden. The idea is simple: have a little “meadow” of flowering plants that will anchor the native bees, flies, beetles, butterflies and moths to your patch. Insects do have a “memory” for where the best meals are to be found: pollen (protein) and nectar (sweet boost of energy).  But wait, there’s more! Quite a few of these insects are also good pest controllers of small sap-sucking and chewing critters on your crops, shrubs and trees. What they do is passive biological control. It’s a good strategy: instead of having to spray against the various pests on your plants, why not let the natural predators and parasites do it?  The animals you’d want to attract to your place are insectivorous birds, of course, like silvereyes. But they can only do