When you get home from work on the warm summer’s day, chances are you want to head out to your back yard or garden and sit outside and soak up the sun, enjoy the flowers in your garden or maybe even do a little grilling for dinner. The enjoyment you get from all of this, however, is greatly diminished if you have problems with insects and other garden pests. Below is information on how to deal with 5 common pests naturally.
Slugs/Snails
These voracious eaters can gobble away many vegetables and flowers if they are not kept under control. Fortunately, this is a fairly simple thing to do. If these creepy-crawlies are a problem, make a DIY trap with a glass jar with a little corneal placed inside it. Wait until evening, then lay the jar sideways in your garden bed; when you check the jar in the morning, you will likely find numerous dead slugs/snails in and around the jar. This can be repeated until the problem is solved.
Aphids/Whiteflies
These tiny bugs are not very noticeable, but they breed fast. This can quickly lead to an infestation, which is bad news for the plants in your garden, as aphids leave them more vulnerable to infections from fungus or viruses. You can help reduce their populations either buy introducing natural predators like ladybugs (which can be bought online) or by spraying down plants with insecticidal soap.
Spider Mites
Another tiny pest like aphids, you might not notice these insects right away, but they can do plenty of damage to your garden: they live on the undersides of leaves and suck the sap out of them, leaving them with sickly yellowed leaves. To eliminate these pests from your garden, take a spray bottle, fill it with two parts water to one part rubbing alcohol and mist all over your plants.
Beetles
This category covers many particular species like Japanese beetles, vine weevils, and potato beetles, all of which can decimate the crops in your vegetable patch. For most of these pesky insects, pour soapy water on the infested plants or pick the beetles off manually and drop them in the soapy water to drown. This is a labor-intensive but effective way to rid your garden of these destructive invaders.
Grasshoppers
These bugs also have a voracious appetite and can lay waste to vegetables and flowers alike. They are a really difficult pest to get rid of completely, but you can greatly reduce the population by generous application of hot pepper wax spray, which makes the plants too spicy to be attractive and will also work on aphids, mites and scale.
So if you are tired of sharing your garden with these assorted bugs, try these natural ways to get rid of them. You will save money with DIY methods and also avoid be exposed to the harmful chemicals that lurk in many commercial pesticides.
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