Wildlife in the garden; by and beyond design

Protect your home-grown food by working with wildlife, not against it — and turn your garden into a resilient, productive ecosystem.

This 12-page chapter delivers hard-won ecological gardening wisdom covering:

• Encouraging beneficial wildlife: Create layered habitats, minimise toxins, and use ponds, logs, flowering plants and native species to attract frogs, lizards, insect-eating birds and bats that quietly perform free pest control.
• Ecological pest balance: Stop trying to “win a war on pests” — mixed crops, healthy soils, small predator populations and tolerance of minor crop damage allow natural cycles to stabilise aphids, caterpillars and other invertebrates.
• Hands-on pest management: From night patrols and beer traps to homemade garlic and wormwood sprays, this chapter outlines low-tech, home-made methods that avoid poisoning your own ecosystem.
• Harvesting abundance: Possums, rodents, cockatoos and other wildlife can become overwhelming in suburbia; learning when and how to harvest surplus animal abundance (ethically and practically) is part of serious food production.
• Exclusion and protection strategies: Anti-aviaries, wildlife-friendly netting, electric fencing, physical barriers, and clever deterrents (including dogs, cats, and even ferrets) offer layered defence without depending on industrial systems.
• Animals with jobs: Well-managed predator pets such as barn cats or Maremma dogs can reduce rodent and pest pressure while integrating into a resilient household economy.

Real examples throughout — from Melliodora’s rodent-controlling barn cat to suburban anti-aviaries and electric possum fences — show how ordinary gardeners are protecting crops, reducing losses, and transforming wildlife pressure into ecological function rather than conflict.