These Common Pests Will Ruin Your Garden
Edible Gardens · plants

These Common Pests Will Ruin Your Garden

PlantsandBeyond

Maintaining a productive garden is challenging, especially when pests come around. They affect your harvest, hard work and efforts. If you don’t catch them in time, the damage could be too disappointing.  Here are a few of the most common ones to be wary of in your backyard:

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Slugs/Snails

Slugs and snails are both unwanted pests to contend with in your garden, even if I find them very cute. They are highly attracted to your vegetable patch and will chew right through the leaves. They eat the bulbs, blooms, leaves and many other green plants that they find. Sliming trails could be observed at night by using the flashlight to confirm this particular pest. They pose a threat all year round, but there are different things you can do to get rid of slugs and snails for good. One of my very favorite methods is to recycle used egg shells. Put them in the ziplock bag, zip it up, and crush them with the rolling pin. The fine mashed up hard egg shells will serve as a physical repellent to slugs and snails. Interesting enough, these creatures have a memory to survive, and once their gentle belly gets damaged or cut by the shells they crawl away and do not come back! You can say they learn the lesson from the very first time.

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Caterpillars

They seem quite cute as they blossom into beautiful butterflies, but unfortunately, most of them destroyed my growing seedlings in the past. There are multiple varieties of caterpillars, I truly consider them as a massive pest. In particular, if you grow any fruit or vegetable in your garden, then the caterpillars is your prime danger to watch for. They eat their way through your plantings and multiply with light speed. Not only that, but they can also chew through leaves and make your plants extremely damaged. One natural idea for getting rid of them is to try and attract small birds into your garden by installing bird feeders. Pollinators, as wasps attack some of the caterpillars and lay eggs in them. The eggs hatch while caterpillars parish.  They’ll soon keep these pests at bay! There’s a neat little video for you below that shows you how to build a small birdhouse to attract these natural caterpillar predators. Here is a neat little video that shows how to build the birdhouse all on your own. What a great activity with your kids.

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Moles

If you don’t appreciate the natural landscape that the moles create in your backyard with raised piles of dirt and sand all around, then mole eradication service will sort things out.  They can lay repellents down that keep the moles away and prevent your lawn from further damage. One major concern would be the moles digging under your vegetable patch. We put metal mash under our raised beds, right before we added dirt to them. No one is digging right under the beds to get through the metal and thus the growing plants continue to thrive.

 

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Ants

It may not seem like it, but ants are one of the most destructive garden pests out there. They are small in size, but they have a hugely negative impact on the way your backyard looks. Primarily, they will create nests around your garden where they can disrupt the vegetation growth or worse yet have poisonous varieties sting you. Oh yes, that happened many times to all of us with the result of inflammatory blisters and uncontrolled itching.  The longer you leave the ant nests, the faster they multiply. What starts off as one nest can quickly turn into multiple ones all over your yard. If not doing it yourself, I recommend getting the exterminators at least once to banish these pests from your garden for good. It was an interesting Summer last year, where all our of our surrounding neighbors used the service to eradicate stinging red ants, and all of them ended up in our yard and vegetable raised beds. Once we used the services, they crawled somewhere else.

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When you spend so many hours making your garden look as beautiful and functioanl as possible, the last thing you want is for a pest to come along and ruin it. Keep your eyes out for these four garden pests and make sure you deal with them as soon as you notice the invasion. The faster you act on the treatment of unwelcomed visitors the safer and more productive your yard will be.

Make it a very green and safe day.

Until next time, dear friends.

Luda@PlantsandBeyond🌿

Photographs listed here do not belong to Luda @PlantsandBeyond.com

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Published by PlantsandBeyond

Green Plants Based Living and Gardening

44 thoughts on “These Common Pests Will Ruin Your Garden”

  6. I don’t worry too much about pests as I just have a small yard with potted plants and they don’t do too much damage to those we have. Last year we tried growing some cabbages in pots and they got infested with caterpillars – but since I didn’t rely on the cabbages for food I was more fascinated by watching the caterpillars 🙂

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    1. LOL. Glad you found joy in caterpillars, Andrea. A different perspective, indeed. Infestation here, esp on tomatoes if not controlled. So frustrating at times. Glad your potted plants are thriving and doing well

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  9. Luda, excellent tips again and all natural. Ants, they serve no purpose only problems. I use cinnamon powder, salt, chili powder and mix in a small bottle of water pour it down the holes. I use cinnamon powder or sticks to stop them coming in the home. Blessings

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  10. Thanks for sharing these wonderful tips, Luda. They’re very useful and I know they’ll come in handy when I need it.

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  11. Awesome post Luda, love your tips as always…I’ll have to give that metal mesh a try, never thought of that. I don’t have a single tree in my yard to hang a bird feeder….uncanny. But I do combat with pesky snails, I didn’t know eggshells repel them, I’m excited to try that. I’m also dealing with a new enemy in garter snakes, should I leave them and let them fight the gophers and moles?

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    1. So very grateful, J! and always love your responses and reflections. Glad to shed some light with crushed eggshells 😉 but Garter snakes appear to be harmless. Their bite could cause swelling from injury, but not due to poison. If they are there, its bc there are working hard to catch the other critters. Good thing you don’t have trees-they could climb on them and hang off the branches… They typically shy away from humans and you are so correct -they must be feasting on moles. Pls let them be. Don’t they crawl away if they see you? Tha’ts what happens here-snakes rush to leave danger.

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      1. They do crawl away when they see me, they are afraid of human contact. I was just wondering if they poised an issue but if they are helping with the pest problem then that’s a relief. Thank you so much for your insight.😉🌹

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  14. What a great tips, Luda! Really useful post. And… I have already told you, I am fighting with slugs and now using crushed egg shells and I haven’t seen slugs around my plants anymore. However we have lot of snails in one part of the garden, so I should use it there as well. Thanks a lot for sharing all that! 💕

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  15. Great post! When the birds aren’t feasting quickly enough on the caterpillars in my veggie plot, I use Dipel dust…safe and natural. It’s my last resort but it saved my tomato crop this year and was the safest thing for the environment. I will also use Neem oil spray when the balance in my garden gets out of sorts. For the most part nature works well, it’s a great food chain if you don’t mess with it too much.

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