A garden is a great way to make your front yard the envy of your neighbors, get out to the yard, or even grow some extra food or specialty vegetables. But all gardens, no matter their purpose, are susceptible to common garden pests. While there are a large variety of commercial pesticides available, it might be prudent to try a few do it yourself techniques before spraying your lawn and garden down with dangerous and unhealthy chemicals. Particularly if you have pets or children, pesticides can linger for weeks, months and even years. Moreover, rainfall washes pesticides into water supplies where they effect wildlife and even get back into the drinking water supply.
To begin, weeds are the common pest that most gardeners want to eradicate. However, pesticides are perhaps least effective on weeds because, unless you use a chemical powerful enough to knock out everything living, most weeds will find a way to survive any place flowers can. The most effective defense against weeds is gardeners two hands and perhaps a trowel. Since chemicals are likely to hinder the plants you want to grow, only the hard work of an afternoon spent weeding can get rid of dandelions and crab grass and leave the flowers completely undamaged.
Aside from weeds, there is another pest, more common to lawns than gardens, but still significant. Moss will often take over a lawn or garden simply because it is better adapted to the climate than any of the other plants, and moss is even hardier and more difficult to fight than dandelions and other weeds. Luckily, where gardens are concerned, moss can removed manually each season and, if on keeps a close watch, it can be brought under control quite easily. Pesticides aimed at moss in lawns often leave unsightly brown patches everywhere they are sprayed and therefore unsuited to use on garden moss problems.
The last type of pest is insect pests. Insects, like bees may instrumental to your garden’s success, but others, such as slugs and caterpillars, can devastate an entire season of hard work. For slugs and snails, a ring of salt is the easiest way to guard your garden. Also, shallow saucers or beer or other fermented substance will often attract most pests and keep them away from your cultivated plants. Insect eaters, such as lady bugs and spiders can be imported to your garden to aid in its defense. Also, insect pests are one area where pesticides might be effective. Many pesticide companies offer products that will make plants distasteful to insects such as caterpillars, without harming the plant itself.
Mammal pests, such as rodents, birds and cats should be kept at bay with a fence or scarecrow.
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