In The Vegetable Garden Pest Handbook, you'll find the simple, straightforward resources and tools you need to identify common pests of edible gardens and manage them without the use of synthetic chemical pesticides. Climate change and newly introduced insect pests are changing the world of gardening. Pests that once produced a single generation per year are now producing two or even three, and accidentally imported pest insects have no natural predators to keep them in check. These leaf-munching critters can cause significant damage in short order, reducing your yields and costing you time and money, especially if your garden is out of balance or your plants are stressed and vulnerable. Whether you're a new or seasoned gardener, author and garden pro Susan Mulvihill shows you how to handle pest issues by growing healthier plants, properly identifying the culprit, and nurturing the overall ecosystem of the garden. With easy-to-use charts, you'll learn how to identify common vegetable garden pests based on both the damage they cause and their physical appearance. DIY pest-control projects, coupled with up-to-date info on the best natural products, physical pest-control tricks, and tips for managing pests with the use of traps and barriers, all lead to a garden where beneficial insects and pollinators are preserved while pest populations are kept in check. Learn how to:
Get rid of squash bugs with minimal effort
Screen out root maggots
Keep cutworms at bay
Nurture the good bugs that help control tomato hornworms
Tackle an infestation of mites, thrips, or whiteflies
Send cucumber beetles packing
Limit cabbage worms with a simple, inexpensive trick
Learn about the best earth-friendly product controls for home vegetable gardeners
Identifying and controlling common vegetable garden pests has never been a favorite task of gardeners, but with Susan's help, positive results are easier than you think!
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on âCancel Subscriptionâ - itâs as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youâve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access The Vegetable Garden Pest Handbook by Susan Mulvihill in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Sciences biologiques & Horticulture. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
INTRODUCTION TO ORGANIC PEST MANAGEMENT IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN
Growing your own food is one of lifeâs greatest pleasures. The act of nurturing young seedlings, being out in the fresh air, harvesting that first vine-ripened tomato, and knowing you are putting healthy food on the table all combine to make it such a positive experience.
At least, it is until that first time you head into the garden and discover holes in the broccoli leaves or the biggest caterpillar youâve ever seen nibbling on your tomato crop. Those arenât exactly positive experiences, are they?
Whether you are a seasoned gardener or a beginner, you know insects and other bugs, such as spider mites, will be one aspect of growing a garden. And that isnât necessarily a bad thing. All kinds of bugsâboth the good and the badâplay important roles in a healthy environment.
Before we proceed, a clarification is in order. In this book, Iâll discuss insects, spiders and spider mites (which are arachnids), pillbugs and sowbugs (crustaceans), and slugs and snails (mollusks). Within the animal kingdom, insects, arachnids, and crustaceans are all classes of arthropods. To be an arthropod, an animal must have a segmented body, jointed appendages, and an exoskeleton, and also lack a backbone (invertebrate). Thatâs pretty confusing, isnât it? My goal is to keep the information simple and relatable. Since we all refer to these creatures as bugs and insects, that is exactly what Iâm going to do in this text!
Humans have identified approximately 1 million insect species on our planet. If that freaks you out, take comfort in knowing that only about 1 percent of those species are pests to us. That puts things in a whole new perspective, doesnât it? Or, at least, I hope it does.
The remaining speciesâapproximately 990,000âare either beneficial or benign. Beneficialsâbugs that include lacewings, ladybugs, ground beetles, and yes, even spidersâspend their days munching on aphids, insect eggs, cutworms, and so many other problematic pests. Other beneficials pollinate the flowers of edible or ornamental plants. Youâll meet these and many more here. Get to know them as your partners in creating a healthy ecosystem in your garden.
Benign species, while they arenât particularly helpful in controlling pests, donât bother humans or the crops we grow in our gardens or on farms. Many of them perform a critical role, feeding on decomposing plant material and building and aerating the soil in the process.
Myriad species of bugs contribute to the balance of our planetâs various, complex ecosystems. In our gardens, beneficials keep the pests from taking over and making the act of growing our food just about impossible, the benigns help keep the soil alive, and the pests feed the beneficials. If you let them, and even help them by how you garden, beneficials and benigns can extend that environmental balance to your garden by managing pests and improving your soil.
As you read this book and learn to embrace and enhance your environment in order to be a successful gardener, it is my hope you will also discover that the world of bugs is really cool. This guide will increase your awareness of whatâs out there, help you figure out which ones might be causing problems, and choose the most environmentally friendly ways to resolve those problems. We gardeners have plenty of options!
WHAT IS ORGANIC GARDENING AND WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT?
Weâve all heard the term âorganic gardening,â yet it often has different interpretations. Put simply, it means gardening without the use of chemicals. In this context, chemicals are synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, or insecticides (pesticides) made in a lab to mimic or try to improve upon those found in nature.
But organic gardening also involves maintaining soil health, regularly monitoring the garden for potential problems, and understanding and using the role insects and other bugs play in the environment. The many organic vegetable gardens I have visited in the US and Europe demonstrated to me that this method can be both beautiful and productive. What I observed has pushed me to embrace organic methods in my own garden for many years with excellent results. If you are interested in growing healthy produce for yourself, your family, neighbors, and community, chemicals need not play a role in the process.
FERTILIZERS
Synthetic (inorganic) fertilizers provide a quick fix for struggling plants and lawns but kill the microorganisms that make nutrients available to the roots of plants. Their nitrogen and phosphorous levels typically exceed the needs of the plants to which they are applied. Irrigation and rainfall wash that excess away to contaminate our rivers, lakes, and ground water. In contrast, organic fertilizers contain lower but more diverse concentrations of nutrients. Plants more readily absorb them and the nutrients improve the soil.
HERBICIDES
While weeding isnât a whole lot of fun, using synthetic chemicals to get rid of them can do more harm in the long run. Manufactured herbicides often last longer on plant material and in the soil than we realize, affecting the quality and safety of our gardens. Planting in soil treated with a broad-spectrum weed killer can make your new plants sick, and the residual herbicide may kill them. I like to use grass clippings to mulch my vegetable garden. However, if I used herbicides on my lawnâto kill dandelions or other broadleaf weedsâthose lawn clippings could potentially wipe out the majority of the plants. Why? Most vegetable plants are broadleaf plants!
INSECTICIDES
For a long time, we gardeners have been encouraged to spray for bugs âjust in case,â meaning whether or not those bugs are present. But insecticides are some of the most problematic chemicalsâfor both our food and the environmentâused in gardening.
United States law requires the label of every insecticide, organic or synthetic, to include that productâs ingredients and recommended safety precautionsâhow to apply it, whether it is safe around children and pets, how long to wait before harvesting and eating the produce protected by the insecticide, how to dispose of the product, and so on. Having this knowledge is for the consumerâs protection, yet I worry about the potential effects of long-term use.
Insecticides are short-term solutions. Some pests in a given population will survive being poisoned, living to pass their resistance to their offspring. Even if you kill all the insects in your garden, more will arrive to take up residence. But pest species are not the only ones you should consider.
Many pesticides are non-selective poisons that kill pests, benign species, and beneficial species indiscriminately. Some of these species lost to âfriendly fireâ may have even solved your pest problem for you. Even birds and other ...
Table of contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Introduction
1 Introduction to Organic Pest Management in the Vegetable Garden
2 Meet the Bugs
3 Organic Pest Management Products and Diy Pest Controls