Pest Control for Your Vegetable Garden

If you find that insects are eating away at your harvest far too often, you have a problem that requires immediate attention. Most of the time, though, you don't need those expensive, plant-damaging, environment-hurting pesticides that you'll see advertised on the television so often. In fact, you can often use measures that can be found and followed locally to keep these pests out of your vegetable garden. Here are some of the best tips you can use to keep your vegetable garden free from insects and other critters:

Purchase Trichogramma

This type of insect is a fly that is not damaging to your garden, yet has no problem living in it. Most importantly, though, it gets rid of those naughty caterpillars that dig holes into your vegetables. In fact, Trichogramma can bury their babies in the caterpillar bodies, which will later eat and hatch out of the caterpillar when they have matured.

Jet Them

Often times, you can visibly see those insects sitting on your vegetables. Get them out of there the most practical way you can think of: shoot them with a jet stream. Pull your hose out of the garage and manually target these insects to keep them out of your garden.

Clean Up Your Garden

Dead plants and trash can be great living quarters for insects when they're tired from a hard day's work of chewing up your garden. Get rid of these pieces of trash and other insect-infested things. Getting rid of their homes will move the problem out of your garden!

Get Rid of Aphids

These small critters are often hidden in your garden, and in numbers can cause damage. However, even a small amount of aphids can transmit viruses that can take out a whole harvest within weeks, so it's absolutely critical you get rid of them. You might want to purchase some ladybugs because they naturally eat these guys, but make sure you cool them for about 15 minutes so that they're too tired to fly away, yet hungry enough to eat the aphids. Lacewings are also a strong alternative to ladybugs, the larvae of which can eat up to a thousand aphids in a day.

Grasshoppers: They Hurt!

Yes, those harmless, cute little grasshoppers actually have a malicious intention: they kill your vegetable garden! So make sure that you don't even let them in to begin with. You may want to purchase some row covers like the ones seen here to keep the grasshoppers out (but remember to take them off when you start seeing flowers).

Use Organic Pesticides

Some bugs, like leafhoppers, beetles, and thrips require a little more to get them out of your garden. Use organic pesticides that include neem, pyrethrum, diazinon, dimethoate, endosulfan, and cyfluthrin to get rid of these creatures.

Time Your Garden

If you have plants that grow just as soon as the squash bugs or corn earworms are at their greatest populations, you're garden won't last long. It's important to do a bit of research on where you live, what kind of insects you live nearby, and what seasons they have their greatest populations in so you can avoid them.

Defend Your Plants

Another great barrier, besides the row covers, is the paper collar. Use these around individually plants that you are looking after if you're afraid that insects, like the cutworm for example, may attack it.

Sources:
Jonathan Edelson, Simons, Hillock, "Home Vegetable Garden Insect Pest Control." Oklahoma State University: Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources.
Don Trotter, "Vegetable Garden Pest Control." Stretcher.