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How To Keep Your Garden Pest Free

When it comes to gardening, you just never know what’s going to creep in and mess up your plants. You can do everything the right way; you can mulch it, weed it, water it, treat it, and still pests can come in and eat up your plants. Keep those pests out of your garden using these tips!

Bugs become accustomed to their environment eventually. For example, if you’re growing the same plants every year, you’re going to get the same bugs every year. You’ll receive more and more of them each time you plant. They’re hanging out, just waiting for their food to pop up. So try to vary what you’re growing.

Your natural inclination might be to run around killing every bug you see, but you don’t want to disrupt the food chain too much here. For instance, keep the spiders around; don’t kill off the ladybugs or those little things with pincers on their backs. These are predator bugs that won’t harm your plants. Instead, they’ll kill the other bugs. It’s the earth’s ecosystem at work!

Certain bugs are attracted to certain plants, but bugs don’t have the best vision out there, nor do they have GPS or the ability to actually think about attacking your plants. They’re on your plants because they can find them easily. Mix and match your garden, planting a diverse blend to throw off the scent and to mask the colors. A bug that eats tomatoes might hate onions, so it will just keep crawling to the next yard!

Diatomaceous earth, also known as D.E. is a powder-like substance that will help prevent snails and other types of pests in your garden. Make sure you’re purchasing the food grade stuff. Although D.E. is a totally natural fossil consisting of algae and other fossilized remnants, you still want to be safe with it.

A lot of people like to mix and match different chemicals and substances in order to wash their plants, when all they really have to do is spray them down from time to time. Just go to the local store and purchase one of those green water hose attachments for a few bucks. Turn it on “spray” and literally spray your plants down.

If you think bugs are the only pests out there, you have another thing coming. Rabbits and groundhogs and squirrels and a wide variety of other animals would just love to get into the garden. Set up some wire mesh or some chicken wire in order to keep those animals out.

Damaged leaves will begin to rot and to smell, and they will ultimately attract other pests and damage your plants further. Go through your garden with a fine-toothed comb at least once a week, picking off the dead leaves and getting rid of anything that may attract those pests.

At the end of the day, no garden is wholly bereft of pests. The best you can possibly do is to keep them to a minimum. Use the tips in the article above to help you fight back against those creepy crawlies so that your garden is always as healthy as it can be.

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