Growing a thriving garden is a wholesome and rewarding pastime for both amateur and experienced gardeners alike. Being able to take a walk around your garden throughout the spring and summertime to witness your hard work taking shape, attracting all sorts of helpful wildlife and is a peaceful and joyful experience. However, all of that hard work can be put at risk when pests begin to take residence in your backyard in abundance.
Small, creepy crawlies eviscerating leaves and larger critters like rabbits devouring your crops are all incredibly infuriating and can ruin what would otherwise be your dream garden. To help you prevent and reduce the risk of these pests from doing damage, we’ve put together this helpful list of tips that you can employ for your outdoor space.
Monitor Your Plants
The first port of call when keeping pests and diseases under control among your plants is to simply observe. Keeping a close eye on the leaves and stems will allow you to notice any signs of damage caused by leaf and root-eating pests. There are a number of homemade traps and deterrents you can put down around your plants to attract bugs away and dispose of them. You can also use something called trap cropping, which is an eco-friendly way to redirect pests away from your main crops to ones that are used as a decoy.
Start Beekeeping
The use of harmful chemicals in your garden can be avoided by beekeeping, which can also help you save money. Beekeeping has a variety of advantages, such as aiding in plant pollination, preventing insects and pests, and producing honey. However, beekeeping can be challenging, so it’s crucial to learn how to start before you begin. The first step to beekeeping is to get the right beekeeping equipment and find a location for it. You must then learn the fundamental duties and abilities of beekeeping.
Do Nothing
In some cases, it’s worthwhile just doing absolutely nothing. Ecosystems regularly balance themselves out, and if you’re opting for a more natural, thriving garden, allowing some pests to just do what they do best can be generally good for your garden if the ecosystem is balanced with the right predators too. Of course, if you are choosing to wait and see what happens, you should continue to monitor your plants anyway to make sure that any infestations aren’t getting out of hand or spreading as a pest plague is the last thing you want for your garden. Seeing a few aphids on a single plant, for example, can be a good way to maintain healthier numbers of ladybirds that will feast on these critters, ultimately improving your chances of having enough of these unexpected predators to control spiralling aphid populations.
Physically Remove Pests
If you are concerned about growing populations of pests, or you want to be extra cautious after spotting one or two of them appearing, you can, in many cases, simply remove these pests manually. Wearing a pair of gardening gloves, remove slugs and vine weevils from your plants, and you can even just blast smaller insects off of your plants using a hosepipe. For those that are a bit harder to dislodge, you can use a cotton swab and some vegetable oil to brush them off of stems and leaves.
Cover Your Plants
While bugs are somewhat more difficult to prevent getting to your plants due to their size, larger pests can be dealt with using some great methods. A fruit cage is very useful in preventing larger creatures such as deer, rabbits, and rats from getting to your seeds and young crops, so check out the options from experts like William James & Co. These metal-framed net shields surround your growing area from all sides, including above. This also prevents birds from eating your seeds and fruits too. You can also get smaller netting that can reduce the chance of small insects getting to your more susceptible, delicate plants too.
Attract Predatory Insects
There is a whole host of different predatory bugs that can assist you in ridding your garden of excessive numbers of harmful pests. Beetles are a great natural pest controller. They will hunt for eggs and larvae along your flower beds, and adding shady spots to your garden, such as log piles, will help to attract these insects. Ladybirds, another type of beetle, can also be attracted by adding plants such as alyssum, fennel, and yarrow, among other things. Yarrow will, in fact, also serve to attract things such as hoverflies which will eat certain pests, lacewings that also target larvae and eggs, and the parasitic wasp. These wasps may look unsettling, and the process by which they kill their prey is equally disturbing, but they are harmless to humans and are incredibly efficient and effective in taking care of some of the worst garden pests, from ants to caterpillars.
Plant Resistant Crops
When tackling disease, a great first step is to choose resistant variants of your crops to reduce the risk of losing your harvest to a particularly bad wave of disease. Some diseases are able to be remedied with treatments available from garden centres. However, there are some which have no cure and could spell the end of your growing season, at least for a specific type of crop. Clubroot is one of these diseases which will impact certain brassicas. These are things like cauliflower, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts. Instead of taking that risk, choose disease-resistant seeds to plant instead, to reduce the chances of these veggies dying before they mature. Another very common disease that can spell disaster for your plants is blight. Blight can strike certain crops, especially tomatoes and potatoes. This disease, in particular, is called late blight and will very quickly rip through your plants, killing off and rotting these vegetables before you can enjoy them.
Rotate Fruits And Vegetables
It’s common practice to rotate where your vegetables are planted for a number of reasons. First, this will reduce the damage that your crops do to the levels of nutrients within the soil. While you can replenish these nutrients with plant food, it’s a good idea to move your plants into new plots with each new growth, as your different plants will absorb different types of minerals from the soil. This rotation will help keep these minerals more balanced. Another great benefit to the rotation of your crops is that it gives pests less time to take root and settle on a plant, starving both pests and diseases by planting crops that those they won’t affect.
