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!
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.
It’s a beautiful, early-fall day. You got ambitious a couple of years ago, and you now have three gorgeous apple trees around your garden. As you get closer, though, you notice something that had escaped you before: the tell-tale signs of cedar-apple rust!
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 […]
One of the most significant issues with fungus gnats is that by the time they’re flying around and annoying you, they’re already a major problem for your plants. That’s why it’s beneficial to know how to stop fungus gnats the minute you notice them. The truth is, once they’re in the air and making you […]
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.
