Sensible Garden Pest Management

Sensible Garden Pest Management

There's nothing like having a home garden to make you begin to appreciate the trials and tribulations of the farmers who grow our food. Between weather, weeds, and insects, not to mention the challenges of soil fertility, it can be an incredibly humbling experience to try to put food on the table with a home garden - especially when adhering to organic protocols that don't rely on quick, yet potentially harmful, solutions, such as herbicides, pesticides, and conventional fertilizers. We've written previously about homemade herbicides, which can help you get a handle on noxious or invasive weeds without as much labor as hand-weeding, and this time around, we're taking aim at insect pests, which have the potential to turn your formerly lush garden into their own insect all-you-can-eat buffet. When it comes to keeping your crops healthy in the face of massive quantities of plant-munching bugs insects, there are a number of approaches that can help turn the tide in favor of your own harvests, and while removing insects by hand is one time-tested method, it can also be incredibly challenging to do so, or can be too little too late. Another, far less time-intensive method of knocking back insect populations is by applying natural or homemade insecticides, which can reduce their numbers or eliminate them all together. Not all bugs insects are harmful, so applying insecticides indiscriminately, especially harsh pesticides that affect even the beneficial insects, can have a detrimental effect on your local garden ecosystem.