The joy of growing a kitchen garden in your yard is imagining the delicious recipes and meals you’ll create using your home-grown herbs and vegetables. Do you know what gets in the way of that joy? Bugs. Gross, invasive, plant-eating, vegetable-killing bugs! I’m looking at you, Tomato Hornworm! I’ll never forget the first time I grew a large crop of tomatoes. I would pop outside to check on my kitchen garden and see that some of my tomatoes had been chewed, and others were missing leaves or stems were completely bare.
Category: Pests & Diseases
In the articles below, learn about the pests and diseases that can ravage a garden, and the natural ways to expel and cure them.
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!
As gardeners, there’s no shortage of disappointments out there waiting to swoop in and ruin the enjoyment of your garden. Rabbits may eat your strawberries, seeds may never germinate, and your nosy neighbor might tell you all the ways he thinks you’re planting your cucumbers wrong. But vegetable diseases are on another level.
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.
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 […]
First you notice yellow or brown spots on the leaves of your squash and zucchini plants. Then the plant begins to wilt. Your established plants begin to lose runners. Younger plants die. It must be the arch nemesis of cucurbits: the squash bug. When it comes to these garden pests, your best bet is to […]
My most eventful experience with indoor garden pests happened a few winters ago. One of my neighbors handed over a gorgeous basil plant that had spent the summer outside in the sunshine. She didn’t have room for it in her home, so I was the lucky recipient. Thinking how awesome it would be to have […]
Ta-da! That’s what my daughter says when she presents a magic trick. Pull a coin from behind my ear, and you’ll soon hear “ta-da!” A rabbit pulled from a hat is accompanied by expansive gestures and, of course, a hearty “ta-da!” So what’s that got to do with soil solarization? Well, it’s kind of like […]
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.
My first garden was a success…almost. I remember watching the tomato leaves develop little buds that soon turned into tiny little green tomato babies. My zucchini was just starting to blossom. And the cucumbers! There were so many cucumbers! What I didn’t have in my garden, however, was a variety of pest repelling plants. And because I found out too late that I needed some of those plants, my garden soon turned into a very disappointing learning experience.