In article ,
"Franz Heymann" writes:
|
| For heaven's sake, gardening is about living with nature. If you
| don't want to give an inch, you are the sort of person that regards
| Monsanto as a "green" company. You can't eliminate ants without
| creating a totally artficial ecology.
|
| Ditto aphids and the like?
| The truth is that you cannot garden at all without creating a totally
| artificial ecology.

No, that is false, on many grounds.

Firstly, ants are far more important to the ecology than aphids,
and local elimination of aphids is a relatively minor disturbance
to it. Even massive reduction over a large scale does not cause
a major disurbance, though the methods used to do so may.

Secondly, ants are FAR harder to kill than aphids, and the only
practical way of eliminating them is to poison your garden so that
it is lethal to many or most insects (perhaps even many or most
invertebrates).

Thirdly, almost all gardening does not create a TOTALLY artificial
ecology, but a slightly perturbed one - a.k.a. "living with nature".
Killing a few particularly annoying ants' nests is compatible with
this, but wholesale slaughter of them is not.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.