Every gardener considers weeds as a nuisance. Pests come in to a close second in line. As seasons change, pests that inhabit your garden also experience some form of transformation. During winter and autumn, it is often the prime time for fleas and rodents.

Summer and spring face the sting of pests, including mosquitoes, ants, ticks, termites, hornets and wasps. While there is a wide range of them waiting to invade your seasons, there are several prevention tricks that can be embraced, including engaging a professional pest control agent.

Engage Proactive Measures

Begin by cleaning pots you wish to reuse thoroughly and clear your greenhouse. This is to ensure that recurring plant disease will not be a problem. Start off your garden with balanced soil by having professional agents test it. This will help in determining elements that could be lacking in the soil.

It is advisable that you rotate your vegetable garden to keep off plant specific pests and disease. Rotating annually denies pests their source of food and makes it harder for them to survive. Most, such as grubs are only able to fly when they get to the stage of a moth, meaning interrupting their cycle confuses them. Crop rotation also boosts the quality of your soil.

Build Healthy Soil

Your garden soil is the primary distributor of water, nutrients and oxygen that plants need to thrive. Research shows that healthy soil has the ability to help crops tolerate or resist pests. It means focusing on building fertile soil to eliminate pest problems. The following practices come in handy:

• Avoid disturbing the soil: Turning the soil on a routine basis is highly discouraged. Doing so exposes the soil, promotes runoff, triggers soil erosion and kicks out worms and microbes. Layer compost or mulch over the soil and allow the worms underneath to aerate the soil.
• Plant cover crops: Towards the end of every growing season, plant peas, beans, and ryegrass among other cover crops to boost the fertility of your soil and enhance soil structure. During spring, allow your chickens to roam the garden or cover it with mulch.

Attract Bugs that Prey

Some bugs act as beneficial predators. Most of them pollinate, prey on pests and decompose waste. For you to attract these bugs to your farm, protein-rich pests will be needed, as well as, carbohydrate-rich nectar. However, you will need a special type of flowers that can act as a source of nectar.

Some of these include green lacewings, ground beetles, praying mantis, spiders, centipedes, ants, earwigs, bees and ladybugs. It is advisable to keep your garden diversified to sustain these bugs. They are mostly attracted to fennel, dill, carrots, sweet alyssum, zinnia, coriander and parsley.

Clean

After your harvest, get rid of plant residue and weeds, which act as pests hiding place. Note, weed is pests’ winter home. These then become butterflies and come into your garden over spring to eat up your crops.

Use Physical Barriers

Erecting a physical barrier between your plants and the pests is among the most successful ways of keeping the suckers away. Crops susceptible to pests must be covered using a lightweight fabric. The cover should bear plenty of slack and the sides should be properly sealed with pins to ensure that pests don’t crawl from underneath.

Till

Tilling your garden will expose the pests and they will eventually die from the warmth or be eaten by birds. Their life cycle will also be disrupted and their population will decrease. Tilling also allows you to kill diseases and fungi that could be a destruction to your crops.

Engage your Livestock

If you have chickens, release them into your garden. They will till the soil and eat all the pests hiding in your garden. Tilling in advance will enable them to dig deeper as they look for bugs.

Once summer and spring pests strike your garden, take action. You must have a plan of action ready, and be sure to engage both defensive and preventive measures to keep them off your farm. By employing these strategies in your garden, it will be possible to strike the right balance between bad and good bags, as well as healthy crops. In the future, you will have to deal with a lower bug outbreak. If you are dealing with pest issues, it is advisable that you create a summer pest plan for proper elimination.