Tips and advice about gardening at home

Do you recognise this? You have a lovely garden full of plants and other greens. But weeds, pests and plant diseases don’t make your garden look any better. They leave your plants with holes and your tiles looking dirty. But what do you do about it? Do you let nature take its course and accept the consequences? Or do you immediately reach for the pesticides and other remedies? If we may give you some advice…. Choose nature! And by that we don’t mean that you should sit back and relax. But instead, use natural resources for pest control. In this article, we explain how you can do that.

Removing weeds

Do you have weeds in the joints of your tiles or near your other plants? Then you may agree that it doesn’t look really ‘well looked-after’. One thing you can do is weed it by hand, but that’s probably not the most efficient way. What you can do when it comes to removing weeds between your tiles, is pouring some boiling water on it and scrub. It is a quick and easy way to remove moss, scale and weeds. For weeds in your garden, use so-called ground cover plants which leave no room for weeds. Or sprinkle your soil with wood chips, tree bark or cacao shells: that also works!

Combat ants

Are you done with all those ants walking in and out your garden (and house). Then there is a way to remove them from your garden in an animal-friendly way. How? Fill a flower pot with some garden soil and put it upside down on top of an ant nest. In about two weeks the ants will have replaced their nest in the pot. Now you can easily remove the nest. You can also use chalk or baby powder and sprinkle it on the ant’s routes. Both sources contain talcum powder, something ants don’t like.

Combat Pests and insects

Do you want to get rid of weevils, clearwing borers, cutworms, sod webworms, chinch bugs, and/or white grubs that invade your garden? Then make sure to buy some nematodes. Nematodes (Dutch: aaltjes) are multicellular insects that combat soil pests and larvae or grubs. The advantage of using nematodes instead of pesticides, is that it’s a natural resource and therefore environmentally friendly. You can find nematodes at almost any gardening centre. Just don’t forget your mask and disinfectant (Dutch: ontsmettingsmiddelen) if you go shopping in an actual store! After all, Corona is still not defeated completely.

Do you want to keep up your garden? Please choose for environmentally friendly resources. It’s better for you and your garden.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinons of the editors or the management of EconoTimes