There’s nothing more heartbreaking than losing your garden to pests and diseases. Whether it’s a rabbit stealing carrots (excuse the stereotype, not every rabbit likes carrots…sometimes they eat your lettuce too!) or hornworms gutting your tomatoes, or powdery mildew yucking up your pumpkins—it can feel like a major loss when food gardening is such a labor of love.
Companion planting is one solution to such chaos. This is the practice of pairing plants that are beneficial to each other. For example, the tomato hornworm hates basil, and some say planting basil close to tomatoes makes them taste better, so it’s a win-win!
You can also make a homemade bug spray for vegetable plants by mixing neem oil with dish soap and some water, which will keep bugs from attaching to the leaves of your plants, making it harder for them to get to your produce.
For bigger pests like deer and birds, you can throw nets over bushes, and put up fences around trees to deter them.
There is so much more to talk about when it comes to pests and diseases because there is an unlimited amount of doom coming for every vegetable garden, but that’s part of the fun, right? Still you didn’t plant a garden not to eat it, so there has to be a limit to how much one wants to undertake with their fruits and vegetables before they start heading back to the grocery store for watery fruits and limp veggies.
In the articles below, we dive into everything you need to know about repelling pests and diseases in your food garden, and you can learn even more about them in our How to Grow a Vegetable Garden: 10 Things Every Gardener Needs to Know Before Starting a Food Garden freebie. Enjoy!
How could something so helpless like a slug cause so much damage in your garden? You might not always know you have a slug problem right away because slugs only come around at night and when it’s cloudy and rainy. But you’ll definitely notice their damage. You’ll see holes and jagged edges on your vegetable leaves and stems. You can tell if the slug damage is fresh by how rough the edges of the holes or bite marks look.
Gardening is a truly fascinating hobby. It’s biology, nature, outside time, and a little bit of zen all mixed together. And the results end up on your dinner table. Not bad. How cool is it that a handful of tiny little seeds will give you an abundance of vegetables and herbs a few months after you plant them? Except, sometimes gardening is a confusing and frustrating experience. Like when your formerly thriving garden now has white tiny bugs on plants from tomatoes to cucumbers to eggplants. And they’re eating away at what was supposed to be your dinner.
I love gardening. I also sometimes hate gardening. Well, hate might be a strong word. But we all have those immensely frustrating moments when it seems like everything goes wrong. Roots rotting. Leaves withering. Flies eating plants. Deer eating tomatoes.
Grocery store tomatoes don’t stand a chance compared to the fresh homegrown variety. From cherry tomatoes grown in containers to heirloom and hybrid beefsteak varieties, nothing beats a tomato grown at home. That is unless you’re unlucky and find yellowing leaves on your tomato plants.
I love deer. They’re such graceful, beautiful creatures, and I love looking out of my window and seeing them stroll through the yard. However, I also love my garden and I’m always looking for new ways to keep deer from eating plants, herbs, and fruits. Deer are resourceful and persistent when it comes to eating […]
You can’t talk about gardening without talking about bugs. There are a lot of bugs that will destroy a garden if you let them. Aphids, whiteflies, cabbage worms – I could list plenty. What we don’t talk about very much, however, are some of the common garden bugs that are beneficial to our plants.
By the time fall rolls around, the hostas and the roses, the kale and beets and tomatoes all show substantial insect/pest damage. They aren’t the only things in the garden that have been under attack. All summer long the slugs, beetles, aphids and other creeping crawling things have been at work. And it shows. It […]
Hydroponic gardens come with plenty of benefits. You can grow year-round, no matter where you live. You may enjoy higher yields, and hydroponic systems usually require less water than traditional gardens. But hydroponic planting is not problem-free, and one of the biggest of those problems is hydroponic root rot. The pathogen that causes both terrestrial […]
I love deer. They’re beautiful, graceful, serene animals. I also hate deer. They eat the apples from my tree, munch on my kale, and eat my strawberries. How do I reconcile these feelings? Invisible deer fence, of course! If you’re new to the idea of an invisible deer fence, it’s not the work of wizards […]
I love my indoor garden for several reasons, but mostly because I don’t love outdoor garden pests. Well, maybe except for those cute rabbits that I always plant a little extra for in my outdoor garden. I also don’t love using harsh chemicals on my vegetables. It’s beyond me how they can kill insects yet be perfectly benign otherwise. Granted, I’m not a chemist, and maybe I’ve watched a few too many episodes of X-Files, but I prefer the DIY insecticide approach.
