So you’ve enthusiastically started growing your garden and are very much excited to see its outcome in a few weeks or so. Keep your plants healthy and have a pest-free garden with these four tips:
Have A Pest-Free Garden With These Tips
Keep your garden healthy by keeping them pest-free, here are four tips you need to know.
Water your plants in the morning.
Not a morning person? You might find these two reasons to get up a little early than usual at least three times a week.
Watering your plants in the morning allows their leaves to dry off before evening. Earwigs, slugs, and snails love damp plants. You definitely don’t want them chewing on your plants.
Additionally, watering your garden in the morning ensures that the soil will be able to absorb enough water and reach the roots making your plant well-hydrated even in the afternoon. Watering them during high noon or afternoon is less efficient because of the water loss due to evaporation. Plants become stressed when they are less hydrated. Insects are attracted to wilting and stressed plants. Some gardeners have noted that the few insects that do feed on vibrant, healthy plants later act sluggish as if they have been poisoned.
Give plants some space.
Have a mutual understanding with your plants, and give them enough space. They need proper spacing from each other for good air circulation. This helps in the evaporation of water from the soil. Keeping your plants too close to each other would invite an escargatoire of snails and groups of slugs partying in those damp and dark areas in your garden.
One study concluded that “introducing planting space will reduce the population of insects as well as reduce the damage which will increase the yield of the crop. At lower spacing 65cm x75cm, insect population was higher, due to [the] higher density of the plant and this resulted into higher damage done to the plant.”
Coffee grounds on your garden grounds.
If you are a coffee lover like me, this would be one easy step for you to get rid of those pests from your garden. Aside from providing nitrogen to your soil, which would help in growing healthy plants, coffee grounds will also get rid of your garden pests. Due to its strong aroma, most insects, such as wasps, bees, slugs, snails, and ants, as well as other animals, such as deer and cats, hate getting near it.
An article mentioned that “at concentrated doses, the substance killed insects within hours or a few days, the report said, and it distorted behavior, depressed food consumption, and inhibited reproduction in tobacco hornworms, milkweed bugs, butterfly larvae, and mosquito larvae.”
Quick note, it may not immediately kill pests when you place some coffee grounds on your soil. However, they will surely avoid being near that area.
Grow bug-repelling flowers and herbs such as:
Chives – repels aphids and Japanese beetles
Thyme – repels tomato hornworms, cabbage maggots, whiteflies, and corn earworms
Chrysanthemum – repels Japanese beetles, roaches, harlequin bugs, and ants
Marigolds – repel aphids as well as rabbits
Geraniums – repel various types of insects, including leafhoppers
Pitcher plants – trap and ingest insects like wasps and beetles. Slugs and snails can also be ingested by pitcher plants.
Garlic – repels root maggots, codling moths, aphids, carrot root flies, and Japanese beetles
Add these four tips to your gardening best practices to avoid those pests munching on your plants. A healthy and pest-free garden provides therapy for your mind and body.