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Fighting Garden Pests
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If you have a lovely backyard garden of flowers or / and vegetables, you can be certain that you will not be the sole one getting pleasure from it.
However, the overwhelming majority of the others will be unwelcome. Pests are bound to be eying up your produce with evil intent as far as you are concerned.
If you cherish your flowers and vegetables you will have to do something to cope with them. How seriously you take this task is obviously up to you, but a garden will soon become overrun if you do nothing at all.
There are in essence two methods of countering garden bugs: there are things that you can use, so-called mechanical ways and spray killers such as insecticide and fungicide. These two ways offer an infinite variation of combinations to cope with garden insects.
A useful instance of a mechanical course of action of protection is the covered frame. A covered frame is a five sided box with no bottom. You stand it over your plants especially when they are young. The top of the box may be perspex, glass or fly screen.
The plastic, perspex or glass top is good for protecting the plant from frost as well as insects, whereas the fly screen will let the elements in but protect the plant from pests and birds. They might be thought of as winter and summer protection respectively.
A cheaper manner of protecting young plants from say cut-worm, is to cut the top and bottom off a drinks can and then cut the body into three rings. Put a ring around a plant and push it at least an inch into the ground, leaving an inch or two showing. Leave the cut edges ragged and rough to deter slugs, snails and cut-worms from scrambling over it.
If that is too much trouble, you could use plastic bottle rings or cardboard treated with oil - maybe WD40 - which will repel insects as well as the above and stop it becoming soggy by rain.
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If you would like to spray your fruit, you will need a spray-gun. You can either get one with a compressor or you can pump it up yourself. The latter are a lot cheaper, do a good job and provide more exercise.
The chemicals used in these sprays is quite corrosive, so buy a spray tank that will resist this. Aluminium, stainless steel or brass are the best, but you should take advice relying on the chemicals used.
Cheaper models will rust away quite quickly. Make certain you can buy extension rods for spraying into trees if necessary.
Slugs and snails are not keen on travelling across rough surfaces, so you ought to save all your egg shells, crush them into a coarse grit and lay them in a ring surrounding your plants.
The weather will break them down, but they contain nutrients that are good for the soil anyway.
If you have an ants nest exactly where you do not need one, wait until the spring or early summer and lay a section of slate or tile over the entrance to the nest. Place an upturned flowerpot on top of this and cover the hole in the base of it.
After a couple of dry days, the ants will have brought a few hundred eggs up onto the slate. You can eat these - Thais say they are an aphrodisiac - or you can feed them to your fish. After a couple of weeks of this the ants will become discouraged and will move their nest somewhere else.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on several topics, but is at present involved with the Bed Bug Covers for Mattresses. If you would like to know more, visit our website at Bugs Infestation.
Article submitted Tuesday, November 29, 2011 & read 108 times.
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» left by Christofer French (168 days 5 hours ago.)
What expertise and detail. So many of these things must be researched. Excellent article and information.
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» left by Owen Jones(197)
Thanks, Chris.
Still only 2.5 stars though.
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» left by Christofer French (168 days 3 hours ago.)
I dont know how that works. I am in the same state of bemusement.
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