Gardening is hard work that is easily destroyed by pests. These gardening tips can help anyone to prevent that from happening.
Coffee Grounds
Photo Courtesy: Farmer’s Almanac
This is a great addition to the garden because of what it adds to the soil. It can add nitrogen to soil, acidity to plants, and physical protection from common garden pests. Slugs and cats in particularly hate coffee. Also, it can repel deer because of the smell.
One can simply pick up a bag of coffee grounds from a coffee shop. This is because most of them have polices that allow them to give away mounds of grounds to their customers.
Copper
Photo Courtesy: YouTube
One of the most annoying garden pests are slugs because of the large portions of harvest and plants they can eat. Also, they are difficult to see unless the effort is made. This is because they do most of their dirty work at night. There are number of ways to deal with slugs.
While coffee ground deter slugs, a more effective and longer-lasting tool is copper. Slugs and snail absolutely cannot stand copper. There are multiple ways to use it for the purpose of warding off pests. Copper tape can be placed at the base of the container of the plants. Sheets and rings of copper can also can also be placed directly on the soil around the plants. The big plus to doing these is that the plants will look like fancy castles afterwards.
An alternative is to buy pot scrubbies that are made of copper mesh. This can be cut and elongated to be a long tube that can be wrapped around plants. To save more money, commercial rolls of copper mesh can also be used.
Traps
Photo Courtesy: Instructables
Slugs are strongly attracted to orange rind. These can be placed around the garden as baits. When the slugs flock these, and it’s just a matter of picking them off.
Alternatively, grape juice or beer can be used as the bait. This is more effective but a bit more costly. When saucers of these are places around the garden, the slugs will flock these, fall in, and drown.
Big Game
Photo Courtesy: We Rule The Internet
While small pests like slugs are annoying, even more destructive are the big pests such as rabbits and deer. These can destroy big patches of harvest in a few days. Taking care of such pests is a little bit trickier.
Generally, home owners would want to have fences to keep these pests off the property. If this is not feasible, then the next option is to scare them by making them think that there is a predator nearby. This can be done by applying bloodmeal. Strong scents also drive them away. Deer don’t like the smell of scented soap and perfume.
Keeping the garden safe from pests is all about setting the correct baits, traps, and protection. Don’t let these critters ruin the hard work you spent to make your garden beautiful.
Kathleen Calado
The IT girl next door who loves travel and photography. Passionate about make-ups and a frustrated dancer. Her dream is to travel all around the world and write a blog for every country that she visits.
