Uninvited Little Visitors In Your Garden- The Pests

I am a passionate gardener.  I always liked to plant my own roses, my trees and even a small place in my garden with tomatoes.  It is very relaxing, you get to spend some time outside in the clean air and you can see the results of your work in beautiful shapes and colors.  If it weren't for those little pests, gardening would be a simple activity.  

You must take some measures in order to remove those unwanted fellows that are damaging to our plants.  The first thing you have to do is stirring up the soil constantly for the earthworms; that way you will make the soil more permeable for the air and the water.  Once you did that, you might get some outside help, as many birds and insects can get you rid of the pests: The sparrow, the chickadee and the orioles; ladybugs, toads.

You can attract all those helping birds and toads with making your garden a good place for them to come back every day.  Build or buy a nice birdhouse, add a water place and some grains and the birds will know that is a good invitation on a place where they will always find food and shelter.  Unbelievably, you can do something nice for the toads, too.  Toads like retreat, dark and damp places.  If you can find in your garden a place in the shade, place there few stones, some leaves and the toads will feel like home.

The insects that damage our plants have two types of actions: some take pieces of the plant and eat it; some suck the juice of the plant.  The insects that take bites from our plants with their mouths especially designed for this kind of work are like grasshoppers and caterpillars.  The second type of insects, and the worst, is the one that sucks the juice from the plant: plant lice, mosquitoes.

An effective way to get rid of those unpleasant visitors would be spraying the plants with insecticides like the Bordeaux mixture.  This poison is either eaten by the insect attacking their bodies or simply through direct action.  The underground pests will give you much more trouble.  You can find out which insect has damaged your plants either by seeing it or seeing the way of action.   

The results are easy to see, but recognizing the insect might give you a hard time.  You can see clearly the clean cuts of your plants and you know: it is a cutworm, you know it.  However, how does it look?  It is hard to see one, because they rest by day in the ground and cut your plants by night. They look like gray-stripped caterpillars and they are always ready when it is the season of hyacinths or peas.  You can block his actions by putting paper collars on the plants.

Plant lice are easier to recognize: they are green, red, yellow or brown.  You can see them on your plants because they are the clinging type; they stay attached to their host and suck its juice.  The biting insects are more dangerous: they hit and run.  Rose slugs are a real danger to my roses as they eat the leaves; they have a soft body green on the above and yellow below.

Other slugs eat almost any plant in your garden.  They lay many eggs in the rubbish heaps, so it is important that you do the cleaning in your garden often.  During the day, they rest below the ground but you can allure them out by watering the soil with clean limewater.  If you see insects coming out from under the plants that are affected, it is they.

Some pests attack a certain kind of plant; some destroy any kind, as long as it is green. Our vegetables and fruits are the biggest prizes: beans, potatoes and cabbages have their own pests.  The tomato worm eats the young fruit of the tomatoes and it is a stripped yellow or green worm.  The green caterpillar that has black bands on his body damages celery.  There is also the squash bug, with a long, brown body, easy to recognize from the bad smell from it when it is squashed.

With so many types of pests in my garden, I had better take some prevention measures right away or until morning, I might find that strange little visitors devoured my garden.