Plant daisies for the hoverflies

Encourage one of the world's greatest aviators to drop by for lunch.

Hoverflies dig daisie

It's definitely worth employing some hoverflies to pollinate your flowers and keep the aphids off your fruit and veg. Their yellow and black stripes mean they're often mistaken for wasps, but rest assured they don't sting. These great aviators make for fascinating viewing, staying airborne for hours on end.
There's an easy way to attract hoverflies reduce your lawn mowing. Leave a patch of grass to grow long so that any flowers get a chance to show their faces daisies are especially popular. If you don’t have space to leave a long patch of lawn, you could plant some cultivated daisies in a border, marigolds go down well too.
There are lots of benefits to hoverflies being regular visitors. You can forget the pesticide for a start as these stripy allies will eat pests such as fruit tree spider mites, greenfly and small caterpillars.

Lawns make a really good place for insect life, even well-kept ones. Songbirds such as blackbirds and thrushes may look for worms, slugs and snails in grass and if you’re lucky, green woodpeckers might come searching for ants.
A short lawn goes down well with badgers, foxes and hedgehogs who will dig to unearth worms… so you might be patching it up sometimes!
If you want to be wildlife-friendly, then don’t aim for a bowling green in your back garden. Chemical weedkillers are poisonous to plants and animals as well as weeds, so it’s much better if you can adjust to a few daisies and clover flowers and mow a little less often. Bees love clover, so you’ll make them happy if you let it flower.
Tap water isn’t good for lawns and sprinklers are not an effective way to water as a lot of water evaporates before it even hits the ground. If you leave the grass a bit longer by raising your mower blades, you’ll help protect it from the sun as it can retain more moisture. If it’s looking a bit ropey after a dry-spell, it will recover.
If you must water, use rainwater collected from a butt. Using a watering can means more water will soak in where it’s needed. Water in the evening, and less will evaporate in the sun.
Leave a patch of grass to grow long – insects will love any wildflowers that manage to get a hold and frogs and small mammals will welcome the shelter.