Effective Organic Pest Control

If you have a garden, you will have pests from time to time. Fortunately, there are plenty of entirely natural ways of getting rid of most garden pests.

For example, snails and slugs can be a real nuisance but one totally natural way that you can protect your seedlings from being eaten by them is by spraying a coffee solution on and around those seedlings. This does no harm to the plants (as long as the solution is diluted 10:1 water to coffee) but when a slug or snail crawls across the sprayed area, they absorb the caffeine and died soon afterwards.

There are some insects that help you keep control of the pests such as aphids and caterpillars that will eat your plants. In addition to bees and wasps, other beneficial insects are as follows:

Ladybugs: these common insects eat aphids, mites and potentially harmful white flies. You can attract ladybugs to your garden by planting flowers that are members of the daisy family such as daisies or yarrow, or you can even buy them on the net! Try typing 'Buy Ladybugs' into your favorite browser to find a local supplier.

Lacewings: These are avid devourers of aphids and their larvae also eat aphids and many other types of insect pests as well. Again, these insects can be attracted to your garden with flowers such as yarrow or goldenrod or you can also buy them from garden centres and on the net.

Brachonids and Chalcids: These insects can be attracted to your garden buy carrots, celery, parsley or caraway, and once there, they will happily munched their way through all of the leaf eating caterpillars they can find.

Because many of the most effective bug eating insects are attracted to flowers, it may make some sense to give over a small corner of the garden to growing flowers that attract these insects.

In this way, you bring natural predators that you want to the garden without having to buy them or bring them there in some other odd way.

And in addition to these predator insects that will help you keep your garden pest free, there are many other solutions which you can apply that are 100% natural and safe.

Mix one tablespoon of canola oil with a few drops of liquid soap and spray the mixture on the top and bottom side of plants that might be susceptible to aphids or mites. This solution smothers the insects and kills them, but remember to wash the plants thoroughly before you eat them.

A natural substance called milky spore can be spread across the garden where it lies in wait for beetle grubs that it can infect with a deadly disease that kills them before they become beetles. As this spore is spread across the garden and is said to remain effective for up to 40 years, this is something that you are only ever going to have to do once.

Another solution that will help to get rid of mites and other insects is to mix two tablespoons of hot pepper sauce or cayenne pepper with liquid soap, let it stand overnight and then use it as an insecticidal spray.

If you have problems with earwigs, snails or slugs, spread diatomaceous earth all around the affected areas of your garden and on the plants because the sharp edges of the dead diatoms penetrates the skin of all of these creatures and kills them. The advantage of this particular method is that it never stops working because the pests are killed by a mechanical action rather than by anything that acts in a chemical manner.

Fungal diseases can be treated with a spray made from baking soda in water, whilst a mixture of cooking oil, baking soda and liquid soap helps to deal with both the fungal diseases and insect infestation as well.

But do remember about all of the bug-killing solutions that have been described, whilst they are all extremely effective, they are also indiscriminate and they will kill both the beneficial bugs as well as those that you are really trying to get rid of.

For this reason, you should only use them when you know that you genuinely have a pest problem and they should only be used on the specific areas in your garden where the problems are manifesting themselves.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com