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!

Categories
Pests & Diseases

10 Helpful Plants for Bug Control in Your Kitchen Garden

plants for bug control

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.

Categories
Pests & Diseases

How to Make Eco-Friendly Slug Repellent at Home

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.

Categories
Pests & Diseases

What Are These White Tiny Bugs on Plants in my Garden?

Damage to a Brussels Sprout plant from pests.

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.

Categories
Pests & Diseases

What’s the Deal with Flies Eating Plants?

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.

Categories
Pests & Diseases

Yellow Leaves on Tomato Plants? 5 Reasons and Remedies

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.

Categories
Pests & Diseases

How to Keep Deer From Eating Plants Naturally

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 […]

Categories
Pests & Diseases

Embracing the insect invasion in the garden

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 […]

Categories
Pests & Diseases

How to Treat Anthracnose Fungus in Strawberries

I love strawberries. They’re the perfect little fruit, too. You can cool off on a hot day with a glass of strawberry lemonade. They make a wonderfully sweet addition to yogurt at breakfast. Strawberries work well in a salad with a splash of balsamic vinaigrette. And, of course, you can never go wrong with a strawberry and rhubarb pie!

Categories
Pests & Diseases

What is Eating My Cilantro Leaves?

If you love good guacamole, you probably already know who is eating your cilantro – everybody! Cilantro is thought to be one of the first herbs enjoyed by humans, going back at least as far as 5000 BC. Well, except for the 25% of people who think it tastes like soap, but for the rest of us, cilantro is a staple in good cuisine! Then you have the bonus: their seeds—also known as the spice called coriander. 

Categories
Pests & Diseases

How to Stop the Japanese Flying Beetle From Destroying Your Garden

The Japanese flying beetle is quite the looker. The metallic green head and shiny copper wings make it look more like a jewel than a garden-destroying invader. Since the beetle’s accidental introduction to the United States in 1916, it has spread and flourished across most of the country.

Exit mobile version