Garden Pests - the answers

Tips and Tricks in Dealing with Garden Pests

Attending to our own garden, I found that one of the most frustrating things that can happen is to walk outside to check on your plants and find they are infested with slugs.

It’s just a routine walk to make sure that your garden is thriving, but you end up finding holes in all of your plants that looked fine only hours before.

The explanations for some of these plant-destroying holes are garden pests.

Some of the main garden pests are slugs, worms, caterpillars, birds, snails, and the occasional gopher.

Although you may try very hard, you can never wipe out these garden pests entirely but after all your effort in the garden you have to do something about the bugs in the garden. Garden insects are one of the worst things to have in your garden; they can live under the soil, in old weeds or piles of leaves, or in a number of other places.

In order to help keep insects away, always try and eliminate places in your garden and near your garden that these insects and other plant diseases could be living.

Remove old leaves, weeds, or any other decaying matter that insects and diseases could be living in from your garden. Also, regularly turn over your garden soil and break apart any clumps so that you can eliminate the living spaces any insects that might be hiding underground.

Another way to rid your garden of the pests is to use dormant spray, which is used to keep destructive insects and diseases under control.

It is best that you use dormant spray when your plants are dormant, usually around February or early March. I have used dormant spray many times on our garden and it has worked wonders on keeping insects out. But as I learned from experience, dormant spray is only effective if you follow the correct instructions.

When I first decided to use some on our garden, I just dumped it everywhere in hopes of killing everything harmful. Unfortunately I ended up killing my entire garden along with my neighbours. Some insects can be beneficial to your garden though, so be sure to find out which insects help your garden.

Another garden pests problem I've had besides insects has been birds. Whenever I see birds in our garden I run outside a chase them away, but as soon as I step inside they come right back. The solution that I've come up with to keep the birds away from our garden is to put a bird feeder in my garden. Instead of costing me time and money by eating our garden, the birds eat at the bird feeder.

In the long run it’ll save you money. Not only can a bird feeder help keep birds away from your garden, but they can also be a new part of your garden decoration. Although not completely eliminating my bird problem, my bird feeder has made the problem smaller. Getting a dog has also helped.

If you start seeing mounds of dirt around your garden, and your plants keep unexplainably dieing, you can assume that you have a garden pests gopher problem. Thankfully, this is one of the few garden pests that I haven't had. However my friend has struggled with a tremendous gopher infestation, so I decided to research it. Gophers are rodents that are five to fourteen inches long.

Their fur can be black, light brown, or white, and they have small tails. One method of getting rid of these root-eating pests is to set traps. The key to successfully capturing a gopher using a trap is to successfully locate the gopher's tunnels and set the trap correctly. Another way to get rid of them is to use smoke bombs, which you place into the tunnel and the smoke spreads through out it and hopefully reaches the gopher.

If you suspect that your gardens are being pillaged by any of the garden pests I mentioned, I encourage you to try your hardest to eliminate the problem as soon as possible. The longer you let the species stay, the more established it will become.

Editor
Peter Charalambos

Author: Peter Charalambos

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