6 Steps To Prevent Your Garden From Pests

Maintaining a garden is a challenging yet fruitful task. With the rise in awareness about processed food, a significant number of people have started to take up gardening as a hobby. People are now coming up with new, productive and creative ways to utilize limited space for growing plants in order to add organic items to their diet.

While living in the city used to be an excuse for poor lifestyle choices, now there is no limit to what you can do despite living in the city. Gardening has become a popular hobby over the past few years. If you are a new gardener looking for gardening advice, then you’ve come to the right place. Here mentioned below are six steps to prevent a pest infestation in your garden.

Be Careful During Seed Selection

The first thing that you should do to make sure that your crop is pest resistant is to choose a certified seed company. While new gardeners may not know, not every seed can guarantee that you’ll have a productive yield. You should do research about what plant you want to grow in your garden and where you can find the best seeds.

Certified seeds are genetically engineered to give the best product. They are made to be drought resistant and pest resistant. A healthy seed will give rise to a healthy plant that would have a natural capability to fight off any pests. While people mainly think that pests attack from the outside, sometimes a faulty seed may be the reason they’re attracted to your garden.

Keep the Soil Healthy

The second step you should take is making sure that the soil is healthy. Before you plant the seed, you should make sure that the soil has regularly been turned over at least twice a month. This leads to the pests that might be hiding in the soil to become an easy target for birds.

Apart from that, you should make sure that the soil you plan on using never has standing water. Standing water can lead to soil erosion, and that can result in a low yield. Every time you turn the soil, you should add compost to it so that it has a high concentration of nutrients.

Plant In A Suitable Location

Once you have a healthy seed and nutritious soil, the next thing that you should be concerned about is the location where you intend to make your garden. You should make sure that the location gets enough sunlight and there is enough space so that the plants can be planted at a reasonable distance from one another. If plants don’t get the required necessities, they can’t reach their optimum potential and become easy targets to pests.

Alternative Planting

Another thing that you should keep in mind is to rotate crops every season. While this may seem like a random suggestion, it is backed by science. If you always plant in the same place, it will deplete the soil of the necessary nutrients that it needs to grow.

Once those nutrients are gone, your garden will be an easy target for pests and different diseases. That is why you must alternate crops; for example, if you’re planting beans this season, try to go for cucumbers or cabbage next year. This way, the soil will have ample time to regenerate necessary nutrients that will lead to a better yield next time.

Insect Repellent Plants

Rather than using chemical pesticides, you should plant insect repellent plants around or in-between your desired crop. For example, if you plant mint around the garden, you can get rid of bugs, spiders and even mosquitoes. Lavender, lemongrass, basil, rosemary and sage are some plants that you should go for. The smell of these plants tends to keep pests at bay, and they can also be healthy additions to your everyday diet.

While pesticides can get the job done, they can also lead to an imbalance in the soil nutrients that may affect your plants in the long run. Along with killing the pests, it can kill the naturally occurring microbes that are essential contributing factors to nature’s defense system.

Regular Harvesting and Pruning

Once the plant gives fruit, you should try to harvest as much as possible. Leaving ripe fruit in the garden makes it an easy target for pests. You should also prune your plants whenever you think that the foliage is too much. Foliage can provide moist and damp places for insects and pests to grow; for example, fleas usually grow under the shade provided by excessive foliage. Not only are they harmful to plants, they can also attach to your pet and lead to an indoor flea infestation, which might require you to use a flea bomb. Here is a complete guide for flea bomb in case that happens. Regular harvest and pruning are essential for a better and healthy yield.

If you follow the above-mentioned steps, you will benefit a great deal. Your garden is like your child; you continuously need to take care of it if you want it to grow properly. Remember that practice makes a man perfect, and if for some reason despite following the steps, you still end up with a pest infestation, then rather than losing hope, try to learn from your mistakes. An easy way to remember all the necessary things is to keep a journal in which you should keep growth and health logs of each plant.

Try to keep a clear system that you work by, so that you can analyze it if something goes wrong and make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Talking to gardeners who have been doing this for quite some time can also be a great way to get essential pointers on what to do and what not to do. Just remember to stay patient and open to new techniques and possibilities in the field of gardening. If you have any queries or recommendations, feel free to mention in the comments below.