Preventing Pests in a Veggie Garden
The best defence is a good offence when it comes to veggie gardening. By regularly maintaining your veggie garden and being vigilant for the first sign of pests you can stay one step ahead of predacious insects and many plant diseases.
Only the strong survive!
- Build healthy soil beds to ensure a strong start. Mulching and top-dressing your soil with compost or natural fertilizer is the best way to grow sturdy plants.
- Pull out weak plants and dispose of them away from your main beds. If they’ve already shown disease the run the risk of infecting the others. Also weak plants are an easy target for insects.
Reduce Opportunity
- Clear garden debris quickly that can house pests
- Water the soil, not the leaves. Wet foliage encourages fungal damage. By watering only the plant base the water is absorbed quickly through the roots and does not encourage fungus or insects to set up shop in your garden.
- Interplant crops! Mix and Match your plants as many diseases and bugs are plant specific or at the very least specific to a genus so by interplanting your veggies with flowers like marigolds you can both repel pests and ensure that you don’t lose a whole crop if one row gets sick.
- Disinfect. If you’ve been working with infested plants, clean your tools before moving on to other garden areas. This will reduce the speed of invading insects.
Treat
- There are a lot of great multi-purpose/insecticidal garden sprays that can be used with Veggie Gardens. Safer’s has a wonderful line of products that can assist with a variety of different garden woes, bugs and fungal. Nataria offers a disease control product which contains live organisms and Green Earth offers an outstanding sulphur dust. If you have a specific pest or problem in your garden, grab a clipping seal it up in a Ziploc bag and bring it to our garden centre. Our horticultural experts can help identify and recommend the right product for you.
