Tips for Pest Control in a Vegetable Garden

Hi! My name is Scott Reil and on behalf of expertvillage.com I will like to talk to you about vegetable gardening. No matter how good of a gardener you are eventually you are going to come up against garden pests of some kind. This is year for me it looks like the problems are going to start with cucumbers. Now I have planted my cucumbers out. The rest of the row looks pretty healthy but I have started to see some issues with these two plants down here. The first thing that I started to see was somebody have been chewing through the base of these guys. It started to get wilty it still has not died back yet but it is not very healthy the way it is connected there. Who do I suspect on that level? That's probably slugs. What can you do to keep slugs away? A good way to keep them out is Diatomaceous earth it is a product that you can find in any pull supply store and often in a lot of good garden centers. It is all natural, it adds calcium to your soil and slugs hate it they won't cross it. Just put a little thin ring of Diatomaceous earth around your plant that would help it keep it away from it. The other problem I started to notice is the leaves are being skeletonized here well that is not slugs that is somebody else. I suspect vine weevil but it could be any number of things, so what is a boy to do? Well in this case I'm probably going to apply something called Bacillus thuringiensis . It is a bacteria that you could actually populate on your leaf. It is perfectly harmless to you but to any animal on the insect side that is eating this if I get the right BT and you do have to ask the people in your garden center when you are buying the BT. You don't want the stuff called israelensis. That is for mosquitoes. You want one that is specifically for beetles. It is going to go along way to help knock him back, who ever is chewing on this. Now there is a lot of other different kind of garden pest rather than the insect variety and I know a lot of people have trouble with the before I get varieties many deer, woodchucks, rabbits, there is more and more products coming available on the market all the time but nothing bets a good fence. You fence remember should extend a little bit to the ground 7-8 inches to make sure digging animals cant get underneath it and in the case of deer it should extend at least 6-8 feet in the air because otherwise they would hop right over it. The best thing to do if you run in across pest in the garden use your state cooperative extension service or the folks down in your friendly garden center who are going to help you identify your insect problem or your pest problem and give you a good way to handle it.