Creating a Pest Free Garden Environment
People with hobby gardens are often concerned about the pests they see or may encounter that have the potential to wreak havoc on the harvest they are counting on. Beginning gardeners, especially, tend to hold to the belief that the presence of pests means that their hard work is ultimately doomed to failure.
There really is no such thing as a pest free garden; any outside area is going to have a certain amount of creepy crawlers or scurries which gain nutrition off the gardener’s hard work. The key is to define in your mind what a pest really is, and to focus not on eradication but on control. We will discuss some options for maintaining a garden where the pest population is controlled, but it is important to keep in mind that with some exceptions that we will note, sighting a few pests does not mean your garden is going to be reduced to a few sad looking green stumps.
Define what a garden pest is
This is probably the most important part of your battle to control the pest population in your garden. A lot of bugs, in particular, which we might regard as pests inside are fairly beneficial in a garden. Spiders will help keep the population of insect pests down, as will certain types of wasp, ladybugs, and many other predatory “bugs”. Don’t recklessly spray toxic chemicals all over your garden in an attempt at pest control; not only will you kill all the beneficial bugs, you will also only partly succeed in eradicating the true pests, and you may even cause yourself some health issues.
Take the appropriate measures
There are certainly some garden pests which are common and that you need to remove when you see them. For the most part, this is best achieved by hand picking them off of your plants and killing them.
You could also look into species specific plants which will confuse or drive away, or even kill, common garden pests. Tomato hornworms, for example, don’t seem to attack tomato plants or fruit planted among sage and marigolds; ants dislike spearmint and tansy. In addition, there are species specific microbes which will attack pests and kill them by making them sick. And of course there is always the biological approach listed above, which uses a predator to get rid of the pest.
Some exceptions to the rules
The big exception to the natural control rules are vertebrate pests, and the larger the pest, the bigger the problem. It’s funny, but it seems we have a definite aversion to poisoning vertebrate pests (again, the bigger the less likely we are to use a poison) but we so often mistakenly go for a chemical to get rid of much hardier invertebrate species.
Mice, rats, moles, voles, shrews, birds, rabbits, possum, raccoons, deer, and even bears in some locations are common garden raiders. For the smaller rodents, a cat is often enough to keep numbers low. If you don’t like cats, you can always try traps, just watch your fingers as you are gardening! Rabbits, possum, and deer can be kept at bay through the use of a fence, just make sure it runs a few feet into the ground and quite a few feet above your head. Dogs may also be very good at keeping these vertebrate pests out of your garden.
When it comes to raccoons and bear in your garden, on the other hand, the best you can really hope for is a pest control company that really knows what they are doing, or that these pests just won’t come back. Of course, both raccoons and bear are the big exception to the rule; once they get started on your garden, you might have to kiss all that hard work goodbye!