HOW do you stop insects munching their way through next year’s cabbages or cauliflowers? Surround the crop with weeds or another plant that the pest doesn’t eat.
Even green cardboard cutouts of plants will do the trick, say Stan Finch and Rosemary Collier at Horticulture Research International in Warwick, UK. Giving insect pests enough green surfaces to land on means they may never make it to the food.
According to Finch and Collier’s theory, the practice of cultivating crops in bare soil and rigorously removing every last weed simply makes life easier for the pests (Biologist, vol 50, p 132).…
