Surprisingly few pests affect container-grown plants, far fewer than in the open garden. You may notice the odd bite out of a leaf or petal, but these isolated incidents seldom merit the wholesale use of chemical controls. Only one or two stubborn pests need chemicals to effectively get rid of them.
As a rule, the fewer chemicals you splash around, the more beneficial insects, particularly lacewings and ladybugs, and even wasps and hoverflies, will move in and do the job for you. These mini-predators have voracious appetites for aphids and other insect pests, and with care it is possible to establish a good balance between friend and foe.
You can even buy beneficial insect larvae to introduce into the garden. If you do this, you will need to avoid chemical controls completely; you don’t want to kill off your good insects. Unless you retain a number of insect pests as a food source, your population of good ones will eventually die out.
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Use beneficial insects such as this lacewing, not chemicals, to keep pests at bay.
