Try These 10 Non-violent Pest Control Tips And Advice

Try These Pest Control Ideas In Your Garden!
Insect pest is always a problem for us gardeners, but there is always a way to get the better of these little guys. The sad thing though is that these pest just keep coming back. Can you blame them though? They sense that our plants are quite healthy.
This situation at times can cause frustration to set in and may force some gardeners to resort to more extreme measures, which is natural for many people to do when things are not working out so well. An extreme approach may not be necessary if you can consider the pest control tips and ideas in the article below.
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Non-Violent Pest Control in Your Vegan Organic Garden
“We kill all the caterpillars and complain that there are no butterflies”
When people think of pests in their backyards, most will think of ever-hungry caterpillars, swarms of locusts, or aphids on your roses. I have pests most of the year round in my food producing backyard garden, though most of them don’t have wings or six pairs of legs. Our most destructive pests are our bored five and seven-year children with sticks. The freshly planted seedlings get up-rooted, all of the agapanthus lose their lovely heads and no green pea ever reaches maturity… Tempting though it is to reach for a pesticide, not really a legal option in this case.
In search of a non-violent pest control
In my research of organic methods of insect control, most of the suggested are certainly violent, often bordering on obscene. You have your standard vegetable dust (derris) which is touted and widely used as the preferred organic pest control method. I had used this without any guilt, up to the point when I discovered that the dust blocks the insect’s ability to breathe and they slowly suffocate. Some advocate drowning snail and slugs in stale beer. Or taking a bucket of methaylated spirits around with you, pulling off caterpillars and dropping them in the bucket to drown. Squashing, cutting, mangling…awful, awful ends to life.
We have a strict NO KILL policy in our garden. The kids are getting the hang of this now after many hours spent educating them about how important all the insects and animals are in our little backyard eco-system. The enthusiast dogs are not so easy to educate! Daisy (our Jack-Russell X) is a terribly efficient mouse and rat terminator. When you have a healthy backyard including a compost bin or two, rodents are inevitable. We don’t put any meat or dairy waste into the compost but they still like eating vegetable and fruit scraps. They all play their part in the system and after the initial ick factor, you do get used to them.
The best way to keep your garden healthy is to really be a part of your garden. You will be amazed at the big, complex world going on in your backyard (or front yard, or patio or whatever you have the space for). My family once spent a few hours looking for different species of lady-bugs in our garden. Maybe one or two, we guessed at the beginning. We discovered 15(!!) different types. Sit yourself down one day in your garden and just look closely and quietly. Incredible stuff.
Top 10 non-violent pest control tips and advice
As you will see there really need not be any KILL policy in your garden either. Using the following steps you will manage to live harmoniously with the insects, snails and caterpillars of your garden:
1. Planting.
I always plant some “sacrifice” plants in various parts of the yard which is often ones that we don’t like so much, but the bugs do. These include plants from the cabbage family and some others that I let go to seed purposely. These will naturally attract the most destructive bugs. This may entail some experimentation on your behalf, to note where they like to hang-out the most. I tried growing heirloom “Tigerella” tomatoes over many seasons but the Green Shield bugs wouldn’t leave them alone. I now grow this variety purely to keep them off my other tomatoes.
2. Compost.
Consider having an open style compost bin. We have both an open version and a closed one (three growing boys make a lotta waste). Our open bin is just a few old car tyres stacked up beside the house, where it is too shady to grow anything. I throw plant clippings and some old cabbage/broccoli leaves/plants in there and I deposit the collected bugs there. That way they have some food and a way to get out if they wish.
3. Moving on.
Another method is to take an empty bucket or container (No Metho, or beer, or anything else that they can drown painfully in) and carefully remove the caterpillars or other bug that you can spot. Take these to your ‘sacrifice’ plants or your open compost bin, depending on how many you have. Use gloves to do this as some hairy caterpillars can give you a nasty rash.
4. Trick ‘em.
White cabbage moths, which look like white butterflies with black spots, will lay tonnes of eggs on your cabbage family plants (broccoli, bok choy, brussel sprouts etc) but you can trick them into thinking the plants are in a territory of other moths. Thread some of the white, Styrofoam peanut-shaped packing thingies (or cut out shapes from plastic containers) onto string and hang them above your plants. These look like other white moths have already taken those plants, and often encourages them to find somewhere else. Worth a try anyway.
5. Nice Predators.
If you have aphids, you will probably have ladybugs in the vicinity. Most of the time they will migrate to the affected plants, however, if you find a plant covered in aphids and no lady-bugs, just take a look around for them else-where in your garden and carefully transfer a couple. I don’t know how they do it, but these freshly fed lady-bugs will soon send out the appropriate signals and others will come. I notice most aphid problems disappear after a few days.
6. Annoy them.
My little boy loves looking for snails and big slugs which he calls “naked snails”. Our snails and slugs always seem….
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John Marsden