Having an outdoor garden can be a perfect way to stylishly adorn your yard. But bear in mind that their booming flowers and evergreen foliage may attract visitors, such as garden insects. And if not tackled with urgency, they may settle into their new homes as permanent in dwellers.
Sadly, these garden insects, such as bugs can do a lot of damage to your plants without you knowing. They burrow under the soil to damage and feed on the plant root.
The following procedures will prepare you on how to get rid of bugs in garden soil against further infestations.
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Where Do Bugs Come From?
A garden bug can come from an infected area. The most common place to find them is in the soil of a newly purchased plant.
Spraying garden chemicals to get rid of bugs and weeds not only cause health risks, they sometimes cause harm to unintended insects like beneficial insects in the garden.
The best way to avoid them in the first place is by planting with clean and healthy fertile soil, matching your plants to the soil type, ensuring the right growth requirements like proper sunlight levels and watering conditions, and using appropriate organic compost and pruning, when needed.
How to Get Rid of Bugs in Garden Soil
Nature offers a lot of non-toxic alternatives ways to get rid of bugs in garden soil. The following steps can help you minimize your bug problems:
1. Prepare a Healthy Soil
The first step in your quest to get rid of your garden of bugs is to prepare healthy soil. Setting your soil with organic compost will assist the soil and its protective mechanism against bugs. Tilling in fertilizers before the growing season can improve the effectiveness of the soil.
Without healthy soil, a host of bugs will breed and reproduce beneath the soil right before planting and this may make it more challenging to get rid of them.
Ensure to cover the soil with black plastic before seeding. Eventually, it can kill the annoying bugs and their eggs extensively. Soil supplies the nutrients; water, oxygen, and root support that plants need to thrive.
Research shows that the healthier the soil, the better plants can withstand pest attacks. Building healthy, fertile, living soil is the most important way to prevent pest problems.
Read Also: How to Protect Tomato Plants From Bugs
Use these other practices to ensure a garden soil free from bugs:
2. Regulate soil Moisture
Bugs flourish in damp soil, and they can't thrive in very dry soil. So, the least demanding and easiest technique of getting rid of bugs in your garden soil is to regulate your soil water intake and to ensure you never overwater your plants.
However, be careful so you don’t over-dry your soil and lose your house plants in the process. Utilize a soil moisture meter to help keep up the ideal degree of moisture for your houseplants, and tackle off bugs as you do so
The right soil watering devices likewise make watering houseplants simpler and assist you with abstaining from overwatering so you can dispose of these bugs.
3. Use Good Watering Practices
Don’t be a hit and go gardener, always water plants from the base – bugs often live in the top inch of the dirt, which will always remain damp and cozy for them especially when you water plants from the top.
Watering plants from the base will make it simpler to keep up dryer topsoil, without risking the overall health of the plant.
To water your plants from the base just empty water into the plant's trickle plate or reserve pot, and permit the plant to absorb the water through the waste gaps.
Never allow your plant to sit in water for a long time. Throw out any residual water after around 30 minutes of saturation.
How to Get Rid of Bugs Eating Plants
Now that you know the measures to take on how to get rid of bugs in garden soil, let's look at how to get rid of bugs eating plants.
4. Use Barriers and Repellents
Barriers serve as hindrances and anti-agents help keep bugs out of your soil. They can act like a divider keeping creeping bugs from getting to your home or vegetables. For instance, by planting carrots in tissue moves cutworms can't get to them.
Plants can give a living hindrance to bugs, as well. Peppermint, spearmint, pennyroyal normally prevent bugs, so plant them all through your garden, and these bugs will remain away.
5. Use Insect Traps Routinely
Bug traps help in impressively controlling the bug populace. For the most part, Insect traps are Eco-friendly and don't influence the development of other plants and beneficial insects in the garden. They make use of lure or foods to attract bugs without hurting other occupants of the environment.
Most times traps alone can take care of your bug problems, other times in cases of serious bug infestation they are best used in combination with other bugs control measures such as beneficial predators
6. Make use of Pesticides
If all of the above methods fail, you may want to attempt an organic pesticide. Start with the least harmful and most explicit cure first, and apply it at night time.
7. Take Advantage of Kitchen Remedies for Pests
There are some very helpful pest remedies on your kitchen counters such as orange and banana peels, cinnamon, and garlic. Garlic especially is a very efficient remedy for bugs. You can put garlic in hot water and leave it overnight.
You can use hot peppers and ginger as a spray on your garden plants, they are also very helpful in getting rid of bugs.
Read Also: How to Kill Powdery Mildew With Vinegar
Conclusion
If you were wondering how to get rid of bugs in garden soil, there are many methods you can choose from, and if applied the right way you will see great results.
However, removing bugs from garden soil can be crucial. So, it is often advised to apply more than one control measure at once and also work in preventing these bugs in the first place by maintaining the overall health of the soil and garden for maximum results and to prevent future invasion by these bugs.
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