Best Ways to Protect Your Plants from Birds
What’s more annoying than preparing your planting beds and carefully adding seedlings or transplants, only to have birds swoop down and peck at everything? Flying creatures like blackbirds, grackles, crows, and starlings all have a bad and well-earned reputation amongst gardeners. But here’s the complicating factor — you don’t want to harm the birds, you […]
Tips for Organic Lawn Pest Control and Maintenance
The summer’s heat has been pretty intense. It’s enough to make a gardener feel downright deflated. And if it’s making you feel bad, think about how your poor lawn is feeling! It’s getting walked on, played on, sat upon, and roughhoused on. So to keep your lawn happy, green, and healthy during the dog days […]
Organic Pest Control For Your Vegetable Garden
There’s nothing worse than setting out new garden transplants and then finding them chewed down, dug up, or stepped on the next day. (Well, there are probably worse things in life, but as a gardener, I’m having a hard time figuring out what that might be.) Just last year, my husband went out to the […]
Naturals Ways to Get Rid of Pests and Insects
While oddball bugs pop up in the garden from time to time, there’s a short list of usual suspects that most gardeners intimately know. They seem to be sitting on the sidelines, ready and waiting for their chance to decimate your roses, damage your squash, and devour your tomatoes. Here are the Top 5 garden […]
Attracting The Good Bugs For Organic Pest Control
There’s nothing more frustrating than planting a beautiful garden with high hopes and dreams for a good harvest or loads of colorful flowers, only to have that garden overrun by pests. Chewed leaves, stems stripped bare of their foliage, and munched-on fruits and veggies dampen the spirit of even the most determined gardener. But these […]
Organic Pest Control Using Beneficial Bugs and Plants
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) sounds complicated, scientific, and way above the head of the average gardener, right? Well, it might sound that way, but it’s really pretty basic information. IPM is just a common sense way of managing and controlling the pests in your garden so that they don’t destroy what you’ve planted. Conventional pest […]
Organic Pest Control Recipe and Gardening Tips
When the growing season really hits its peak during the summer, our gardens can often look like out-of-control invasions by plants from outer space. Don’t despair! There’s no need to call the Men in Black! Just follow these 10 tips for a healthy summer garden and you’ll be just fine. 1.Tilling = Weeds. The […]
Beneficial Insects for Natural Pest Control
Organic gardening is all about using nature to help nature. Insects are not all bad. Some insects have bad reputations – think wasps, brown recluse spiders, and army ants. And some insects are very destructive in the garden. Aphids, caterpillar loppers, and mites all enjoy eating the foliage on your vegetable plants. But many insects […]
6 Steps to Protect Your Vegetable Garden From Groundhogs
What’s more annoying than preparing your planting beds and carefully adding seedlings or transplants, only to have groundhogs stumble upon your garden just to quickly wipe it out with their voracious appetite? To help, we’ve compiled some of our best tips on how to avoid groundhog invasion and protect your garden. Protect Your Vegetable Garden […]
Tomato Hornworms
The tomato hornworm is a big green caterpillar with white stripes and a black horn-like protrusion on its rear. Because they can grow up to 4″ long, you would think they would be easy to spot. Their green color provides the ultimate camouflage, however, and allows them to be close to invisible against the green […]