Eco-Friendly Pest Control Tips for Your Home and Garden

If you have a garden and you have pests, a lot of people think it can be difficult to get rid of them in an environmentally friendly way. However, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are all kinds of natural ways to get rid of pests and they can even be more effective than traditional measures. Here are 5 eco-friendly pest control tips for your home and garden.

  1. Plant garlic around the perimeter or your garden. Garlic is great not only because it is good for you and tastes great in just about everything, but it’s also extremely offensive to a lot of pests. If you plant garlic around the perimeter of your garden, you can keep a lot of pests from entering and getting to the plants that they are looking for. It’s basically the equivalent of squeezing ketchup on someone’s ice cream.
  2. Be sure you are watering appropriately. One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of people make is not watering appropriately. Whether you are watering too much, too little, too early or too late, if you haven’t mastered your watering schedule then you could be killing your own garden. Consult a gardening expert who can examine the sun exposure your plants are getting, the amount of water, and the best time for watering. Otherwise, your plants could be drying out or growing mold, and in either case they can attract unwanted pests.
  3. Irrigate your garden appropriately. In addition to being on a proper watering schedule, you want to be sure that your garden also has proper drainage. If the water isn’t sinking deep enough into the soil, then it could just be rolling past and not really feeding your plants. However, if there’s no drainage, it could be drowning your plants at the roots. If your garden is on a slope, be sure to put the plants that need the most water on the bottom, and the ones that need the least on the top. This simple consideration can work wonders in regard to pest prevention.
  4. Deter pests of the insect variety with their natural predators. If you are dealing with a pest like aphids, then you can easily get rid of them by introducing a large colony of ladybugs to your garden. You can easily buy large boxes of ladybugs online and have them delivered to your home. You can scatter them all over your garden and they’ll go to work eating your pests, and they’ll leave your plants alone completely.
  5. Find their home base and create your own disturbance. If you are dealing with rodents that are building tunnels throughout your yard, you can find all kinds of ways to make them feel unwelcome. You can run your garden hose on high through their tunnels, effectively filling their home with water and forcing them to move. If that doesn’t work, you can string lights through their tunnels, making it impossible for them to sleep. You can even buy a cheap radio and keep it switched on to an am talk radio station to disturb their sense of safety. In all cases, you will not be killing these pests; just making them feel completely unwelcome.

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