Do It Yourself – Protecting Your Plants from Pests

I am a novice gardener. For the first time in my life I decided to try and grow my own veggies. This has not been w/o some bumps along the way. One of those bumps has been dealing with pests eating my poor plants!

This post is dedicated to a few quick solutions you can do to help fight against bugs in your garden.

1) Help your plants by planting more plants.

• Mosquitoes do not like citrus scents (hence citronella candles).  Lemon Grass, Balm, Lemon Basil, Tyme, Lavender, Marigolds and much much more help repel mosquitoes.

2) Bring on the good bugs

• Lady Bugs, Preying Mantis, Earwigs, and a few others are considered “good”. (Earwigs can be a pest to herbs, but they kill slugs which is a bigger pest to me.)

3) Bring out the Homemade Bug Spray

• Give this recipe a shot from Kitchen Stewarship

What you need?

-Mashed Garlic

-Mint 

-Hot Red Pepper

-Dishwashing Liquid

-Spray Bottle

 

What to do? (Unfortunately there are no measuring so I just guessed enough for a spray bottle adding one table spoon of each item and one quick squirt of detergent.) Heat garlic, mint and hot red peppers in a pan of water to a near boil. Remove the liquid and allow to sit over night. In the morning strain the mixture and add a squirt of detergent and spray down the plants.

4) SLUGS! EW! (My REAL big pest)

• I began to notice nice almost perfect holes in the leaves of my bell peppers, after some digging I came to find out it’s slugs. YUCK! So what did I try? Egg Shells! We eat a lot of eggs so I take all of those shells and put them at the base of my plants. So far so good, no new holes.
• Citrus Peels in the base of the plants help against more mosquitoes and slugs.
• Coffee Grounds, they don’t like the caffeine. We have a Keurig so I just cut the top and sprinkle around a plant.
• Beer, they love some beer. Pour a little in a small can, dish, or plastic item and let them have at it. They drown themselves in beer. I know men that would like to go out that way.

So far doing these simple steps in my very modest container garden has done very well. They are simple to do so why not give it a shot?!