Everyone loves a beautiful garden – including creepy crawly bugs. Bugs can destroy all the hard work you’ve put into your garden – including eating those juicy tomatoes before you do. You gotta get rid of them, but before you reach for toxic pesticides, try out a natural remedy. Check out the tips, after the jump…
To get rid of pests, try these methods in order as listed:
1. Use natural predators such as birds, wasps, lady beetles, frogs, etc. who will eat garden pests.
2. Grow healthy plants – plants under stress are more vulnerable to bugs and diseases.
3. Eliminate bugs mechanically – hand-pick them off plants and out of the garden.
4. Erect barriers, such as a crop cover, to prevent infestation from starting.
5. As a last resort, apply a topical non-toxic treatment, such as vegetable oil to deter pests.
6. Start the process over again.
For more details see the original Washington Post article here.
(Image by Flickr member Fimb licensed for use under Creative Commons)
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Planting marigolds helps. As does putting coffee grounds around things like lettuce etc. Slugs won't cross it because it cuts their bellies! http://www.poweredbytofu.com/2009/06/01/we-dig-it/
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I recently got some ladybird larvae to eat the aphids in my garden. At first I was skeptical but those tiny creatures can really eat, they've chomped their way right through all the aphids. Now I'm looking forward to them becoming cute ladybirds and hopefully reproducing.
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Another trick for aphids in the garden, from my grandfather, who has kept an organic kitchen-garden for many years. I now realise what an important job he did creating this garden when I was growing up - I had the best fruit and fresh organic veggies in the summertime!
Take some brown onion skins, just your regular onion skins you peel off and usually throw away when you cut up onions for making dinner. The skin off one onion is enough. Take some jar that can handle boiling water - and pour boiling water onto the onion skins. Let the water sit for a couple hours or until the water cools down, then pour the onion-ey water into a spray bottle, and spray your plants. Aphids and many other bugs hate onion water, apparently!
This is something you'd have to do regularly, though, as it's not a pesticide that sticks around on the plants, it's something you'd have to reapply. But it's very easy to re-make the mixture in the kitchen as needed, since it's healthy to cook with onions anyway, and this way you use the onion skins that you'd usually discard!
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Google "companion gardening" for a specific list of flowers and herbs to plant with your vegetables to deter pests. Mint, marigolds, onions, and garlic are nice all-around deterrents, but there are a lot of other options out there, too.
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You can buy microscopic wasps and nematodes from many online natural gardening sites. These eat fleas, termites, japanese beetle grubs, and other destructive insects.
A spray of one tablespoon dish soap to 1/4 cup of household cooking oil and a tablespoon ground chili pepper works wonders on sucking insects like mites and aphids. Add the mix to a hose sprayer and fill with water. I used these for avocado mites on my avocado tree twice in a four month period and have never seen the mites return. Completely non-toxic and can be made using organic ingredients for us purists.
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