Another thing that new organic gardeners become confused about, and sometimes even frustrated with, is figuring out how to control pests and bugs in their gardens. It doesn't matter if you're growing roses, annuals, perennials, bushes, trees, vegetables or something else… all plants have one or more bugs which seem to like to feed on either the plant leaves and stems, the flowers themselves, or both.

The most natural way to control pests in your garden is to simply hand pick the bugs off of leaves and flowers as you find them. This is a time consuming process for large gardens though, and many people do not like controlling pests this way alone. Thankfully there are many other things you can do to help with the process naturally though.

One step you'll need to take is effective weed control. Be sure to leave enough space between your plantings to allow yourself room to pull up weeds as you see them. In vegetable gardens particularly, it's helpful to leave a wide enough space between the rows which will allow you to take a hoe to the area, because this makes weeding go much faster. If you pull or hoe weeds while they're still quite young and small, you'll see the best results too. Because they come out of the ground much easier, and they don't have a chance to start dropping seeds and drawing in a lot of bugs and pests to the area.

Another natural way to control pests though, is through planting itself. By planting certain herbs and flowers around your garden, you can naturally control and even repel a wide variety of common garden pests.

Planting chives around your apple trees for instance, will help prevent scab. And if you plant chives around your roses, they help prevent black spot.

Elderberry is a plant which can be used to get rid of garden moles. Just stick branches and leaves from this plant down into the mole holes, and they'll leave the garden. You can also make a tea or wash with the leaves from this plant, and it will help repel aphids, carrot root fly, peach tree borers, and cucumber beetles too.

Garlic is another wonderful, all natural repellant for your garden too. The flavor of garlic can be abosorbed by other plants though, so don't plant it near any vegetables that might taste bad with a hint of garlic flavor in them.

Lemon Balm is another wonderful, all natural herb which works excellently as a repellant for a variety of things. You can sprinkle lemon balm leaves throughout your garden to repel a number of different bugs and pests, and you can even rub the crushed leaves on your skin to prevent mosquitoe bites too.

Tags: Organic Gardening, Natural Pest Control

When you decide to try your hand at organic gardening, one of the most frustrating parts of the entire process is trying to control pests, disesases, and other miscellaneous problems that come up with any form of gardening. Thankfully though, there are natural techniques which can be used to solve many of these common gardening problems, and one of those techniques is known as companion planting.

Companion planting is the process of planting specific flowers, herbs, and vegetables together in a way that either enhances the taste of the vegetables, and/or serves to help naturally control common pest and bug related problems in the garden.

Companion planting is important and useful for natural garden pest control, but it's also very important in vegetable gardening too. When you decide to plant two or more vegetable plants close together in your garden, you could end up with either a very bad tasting vegetable, or an extremely good one. And how your vegetables taste is dependant upon which companion plants you chose to plant together.

If for instance, you plant basil close to your tomatoes, or put them together into the same container garden, you can enhance the flavor of the tomatoes - particularly when using them to make home made sauces such as spaghetti sauce.

Chives is another excellent companion plant for tomatoes as well as carrots. Not only will the flavor improve, the growth of these plants will too. Chives also helps to keep aphids away from tomatoes, and they're thought to help keep carrot rust flys away too.

Chives can even help prevent black spot on roses. They need to be planted near the roses for two or three years before they begin to help prevent this common disease though.

Planting cabbage with celery, dill, onions or potatoes will benefit all these plants, but trying to plant cabbage too close to tomatoes or strawberries may cause problems with both growth and production.

Marigolds, also known as Calendula, are a very common flower to use for repelling pests around your home and garden. These little flowers have been used for this very purpose for centuries. You can scatter them throughout your yard and garden to help repel a variety of common bugs and pests. You need to plant marigolds which have a scent though, or else they won't work to repel the bugs. Some people don't like the scent of marigold flowers either though, so if you've never smelled them yourself, you may want to before planting too many.

Tags: Companion Plants, Organic Gardening, Marigolds

When you first plant your new vegetable garden, it almost looks bare. The vegetable plants may be tiny still, or not even sprouted yet, and since you recently turned the soil and made the planting rows, there are also no weeds growing either.

For some people, just the fact that weeds create green in their garden is enough for them to allow the weeds to continue growing. Some weeds are even beautiful in their own rights too, and many gardeners are hard pressed to pull something out that looks pretty.

When you're growing vegetables in a garden though, particularly if you're growing the vegetables organically, letting weeds grow can create a large variety of problems.

The first problems weeds will create for you is watering. Since most weeds consume large amounts of water, they'll often steal the water from your vegetables, and this will stunt the growth of your vegetable plants and sometimes even make them not bear anything for harvesting as well.

Another big problem weeds create in a vegetable garden is nutrients. Like the water, weeds will steal essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals from the soil that your vegetables need to grow healthy and strong. And if the weeds are stealing it all, there may not be enough left for your vegetables to grow well, if at all.

Last but not least, weeds also create massive pest control problems. When weeds crop up in the vegetable garden - especially if there are lots of them growing - they will attract a wide variety of pests and bugs into your vegetable garden. And those bugs and pests will start munching happily away on the stalks, leaves, and stems of your vegetable plants. Some of them will even start eating into the growing vegetables themselves, ruining them for your family's eating enjoyment.

Now, the reasons above are the exact reasons you create a vegetable garden with rows of mounded soil.

By creating mounds of soil which the vegetables grow on, you're able to let the water reach their roots much faster. Because when you start watering your vegetable garden, the water will naturally flow into and fill up the lower lying areas first. If you watch this process while watering your garden, you'll see that the water starts seeping into the mounded soil at the sides, underneath the top of your vegetable plants. In other words: Where the roots are.

The other benefit of planting your vegetables in rows of this sort though, is easy weed control. If you space your vegetable growing mounds far enough apart, you're able to walk through every few days with a simple garden hoe, and scrape out any weeds which might be starting to crop up in the lower lying areas.

This makes weeding the vegetable garden a fairly quick and simple process, as long as you make sure to pull or hoe the weeds regularly. Once a week minimum, but if you have a few minutes, do a quick pass with your hoe a few times each week to keep the weeds from invading your garden.

Tags: Vegetable Garden