Tracing Food Chains in a Garden Can Lead to Surprising Lessons

Each garden, regardless of size or size, has at least certain characteristics of a functional ecological system. By tracing the food chains in a garden, we can learn to appreciate the function of the natural world around us and to gain a deeper appreciation of our place in the system as a whole.

When we take a closer look at the food chains in a garden, we can start really understanding how each creature – not just – explains its environment. Or how, as we say in the permaculture circles, “all gardens”.

Tracking food chains in a garden can also help us to deepen a little more the complex mechanisms that all play a role in the growth aid of our gardens. We can also better understand the complex interactions and interdependencies that we will find in any garden.

Take a look at the food chains in your own garden can sometimes give surprising observations, and it can really make you think – as it made me when I started to map some of the food chains of my own garden.

Work what eat what

It is not always easy to determine what eats what in a garden. Often, interactions take place out of our sight, and of course, there are a lot of microscopic meals that we cannot see with the naked eye.

But we can get closer to determining what eats what, first of all, to verify what species we have in our gardens. Many we can see and observe. And we can know more about the species we see to find out what they could consume.

Predators and prey

I started by looking at the big predatory creatures I have in my garden. We have the occasional fox, for example. And birds of prey such as buzzing, cruisers, barn owls and fawn owls.

Some predators are at the top of their potential food chains, while others, of course, can be both predators and prey. Taupes, for example, are creatures on which prey and prey. They eat earthworms and other basement creatures and are sometimes eaten by foxes and birds of prey.

With most creatures in the garden, including common pests, the key to successfully live with them and prevent population explosions is to understand what they eat and what eats them – their place in the garden food chains.

We must understand that there will never be a single linear food chain in operation. Different creatures will compete in various forms of prey. Just think about the number of different things that will eat a single kind of insect. Looking at what eats aphids, for example, will show you how much you can face even in the smallest spaces.

Ecosystem niches

When we use the term “niche” in ecology, we use it to describe how an organization or a population reacts to the distribution of resources and competitors, for example, by increasing when resources are abundant and when predators, parasites and pathogens are rare. And also how, in turn, modifies these same factors – for example, limit access to resources by other organizations, acting as a food source for predators and a consumer of prey.

Working the niches occupied by various wild animals in our gardens can help us to recognize how we could introduce new features in space for profit and what niches in a garden can still be filled.

A deeper understanding

Watch who eats what, when and where in our gardens can reveal a lot about how our gardens work ecologically speaking. This can help us not only to better understand our gardens, but also to make them work better and to find our own place as a gardener within the systems around us.

For example, watching food chains and ecosystem niches in my own garden allowed me to recognize that I should leave the Campagnols (to give an example) to live in space.

Although these creatures and many others are sometimes considered as parasites, they are extremely beneficial to attract creatures that not only eat them, but also help keep other pest populations and keep the ecosystem in balance.

Seeing links with an open mind can help a gardener understand that nothing in nature works alone, and we can get better results if we let nature also do a little gardening.