17 Natural Pest Control Tips

As we approach gardening season once again, I start becoming inundated with feelings of giddiness. I can visualize the bright green leaves of my beloved swiss chard. I can almost smell that distinct aroma of tomato plants paired with basil right at their feet. Feel the warmth of newly turned compost.

Ahh. So good.

I hate to be this person, but with those wonderful sensations come some…not so wonderful visitors.

I’m talking about garden pests. What does garden pest mean to you? For me, I’m constantly in battle with our well-fed neighborhood squirrels, cabbage moths wreaking havoc on my brassicas, and those all-too-wonderful (sense the sarcasm) squash bugs.

If you are anything like me, you are into this whole ‘feed yourself while maintaining a healthy ecosystem’ approach to gardening. Within this goal, I try to eliminate my usage of harmful pesticides and insecticides. You know the ones. Anything I am adding to my garden I want to be feeding the soil, not harming it. I also want to make sure I’m keeping my yard a safe space for our essential pollinator friends.

In this article, I’m going to outline methods of pest control that have proven useful for me and some of my fellow gardeners across the US. Some utilize companion planting methods while others include homemade solutions you can safely apply to your garden. Hopefully seeing all of these alternatives will help you to think twice before buying that bottle of ‘insect eliminating’ solution. Let’s dive into it!

Row Covers

This method of pest control is especially helpful to protect your new seedlings from pests such as cabbage moths. You can purchase row covers to sit over your raised beds or in-ground garden. I have only ever utilized row covers for crops such as leafy greens and brassicas, ones that do not rely on pollinators to provide you with a harvest for the year. Makes sense right? Since the row cover does not allow pests through, it does not allow beneficial pollinators through. So if you need to place a row cover on any flowering or fruiting plants, you will have to play around a bit to make sure your plants are being pollinated.

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Nasturtiums As a Trap Crop

Some crops are just so dang attractive to some pests that they cannot ignore them. A good example of that is one of my favorite flowers, nasturtiums. There’s something about those terrestrial lily pads that cabbage moths just cannot pass up. Which is great news if you also have brassicas that you are attempting to grow nearby! This year I am enlisting the help of many (okay, seriously, dozens) of nasturtiums that I started from seed. I am inter-planting them among my cabbage plants, kale and other seedlings that those pesky moths are especially attracted to.

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Companion Planting with Marigolds

A good example of companion planting is the ever popular marigold. A flower that can be considered a powerhouse garden protector, marigolds not only repel some common garden pests, they attract beneficial pollinators with their many blooms. Did you know that there is evidence that French marigolds help control root knot nematodes? How cool is that!? Nematodes exist in the soil, so while they are not a garden pest that you can see, they are certainly a pest that can cause quite a bit of devastation to your plants. For these reasons, and because they’re such a cheerful little flower, I scatter quite a few marigolds around my garden every year. This year, I’m growing this variety and any other variety that happens to self seed and come back this year…

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Strong Smelling Herbs

Even though we live in the high desert in Colorado, we have a large creek less than a mile from our house. As many of you probably know, warm summer weather + water = mosquito heaven. Oof. I am so very allergic to mosquito bites so if there is anything I can do to repel them you bet I’m going to do it. Planting smelly herbs like catnip, lavender, chives and citronella can help to deter mosquitoes and other garden pests like flea beetles from settling at home in your garden. We also have a few citronella scented candles that we place on our outdoor table.

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Red Plants vs Green Plants

Did you know that pests seem to prefer green leaves versus their more colorful red and purple counterparts? Think about cabbage moths for a second: I’ve grown both green and red/purple varieties of kale before, and time after time the moths tend to lay their eggs on the green varieties far more than the others. Why do you think that is? One idea is that the little green caterpillars that emerge and munch the leaves will be more vulnerable on a purple leaf versus a green leaf. It can camouflage and hide easier on the green leaf, but sticks out to predators on the purple. This year I am planting only red and purple varieties of brassicas. I’ll keep you posted on the cabbage moth pressure.

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Make Your Garden Attractive to Birds

Okay, maybe if you are having an issue with birds destroying your crops, this may not sound very appealing to you. Keep reading for ways to keep that from happening. But for now, this tip is for those of you who are having trouble keeping up with the insect pest pressure in your garden. One year, we had hoards of grasshoppers come through and decimate our garden. We sprinkled some bird seed around our pest infested areas. Mounted a few bird houses nearby. This is a go-to method that I continually come back to when I can’t seem to get a grip on the pests.

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Covered Beds

For those of you who are fighting the birds for your beloved crops, this tip is for you. Or, perhaps you are fighting critters like squirrels, rabbits and rats. Or you know, even your own backyard chickens! My husband and I decided to build covers on the majority of our raised beds to ensure that we get to actually eat some of the things we grow. In the first year, those aforementioned neighborhood rodents were helping themselves to every single piece of produce that existed…

Another reason we opted for the raised bed covers is because here in Colorado, we have massively destructive hail storms that come through in the summer. I’m talking softball sized hail stones falling from the sky. No joke. If I can predict a storm coming, I can go throw an old bed sheet or towel over the A-frame and know that my crops are going to be fine once the storm passes.

Any interest in a follow up post detailing how we built our raised bed covers?

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Hardware Cloth

I’ll be straightforward with this one. Hardware cloth is so much better at keeping pests out than chicken wire. Chicken wire is bendy, and easily manipulated by critters such as rats, squirrels and raccoons since the holes are pretty large. For this reason, I always use hardware cloth on my chicken coops, never chicken wire. If you have gopher or other digging critters nibbling on your plant’s roots, you can line the bottom of your raised garden beds with hardware cloth to create a barrier.

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Cloches

Cloches are a new player in my pest-control game, and boy are they here to stay! They can be as simple as forming some chicken wire or hardware cloth over the top of your newly transplanted seedlings, or you can purchase pre-made cloches like these ones. Either way, they’re a good temporary measure of security for those things that you just don’t want critters getting into! I’m looking at you again, squirrels. 

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Hanging Shiny Tape or CDs

Birds won’t leave your fruit bushes and trees alone? One timeless method to scare them away is to hang shiny objects that move with even the most gentle of breezes. You can buy reflective orchard tape or hang any obsolete CDs taking up room on your shelf for the same effect.

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Decoys

One of my gardening gal pals recently posted an image of her newly transplanted pepper plants completely cut in half from the ground up. It looked like someone came through and snipped it off with scissors! Apparently it was the work of a cutworm, something I have never had to deal with, thankfully. She shared a solution to ‘redirect the cutworm from munching on the stem. She cut up a few bamboo skewers and placed a handful of them around the remaining plants, close to the stem. This is to mimic the presence of a stem and redirect the cutworm to munch on the skewer instead of the precious pepper plants.

I’ve heard of folks painting little rocks bright red and placing them in their strawberry patch, to trick birds into thinking all of the bright red strawberries are hard as rocks. Hey, if anything, you can paint cute, bright rocks and place them around your garden just because you’re an adult and because you CAN.

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Soapy Water Solution

Soapy water solutions are effective at killing soft-bodied pests, such as those pesky aphids and spider mites. Mix 1 tablespoon of soap (we use this castile soap) with a quart of water, shake it up, and go to town! This solution kills these pests on contact, so don’t be shy when spraying your plants. Get in all of the nooks and crannies and spaces that those critters may be hiding. Using a soapy water spray on plants is totally safe for the plants, and can be reapplied every few days.

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Diatomaceous Earth

I am adding this option on this list because it does in fact help destroy garden pests. But unfortunately, DE does not distinguish between garden pests and garden helpers. Meaning that I recommend you attempt all the other organic pest control methods before resorting to this.

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First Saturday Lime

Lime works in a similar way that diatomaceous earth works, but it is so much safer to handle. There is no risk of respiratory illness when spreading it, and it is safe for your family members and pets to be around. Heck, you could accidentally ingest some and be a-okay.

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Chili Powder

So many creatures, myself included, cannot stand the aroma of chili powder. Sprinkling some around your precious plants might mean they are spared from that neighborhood squirrel for yet another day. Or you know, if you want to keep me out of your raspberry patch. Good luck. 

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Enlisting Your Poultry

My backyard chickens have many talents. The main one is making me breakfast every day, and the next best one is keeping the grasshopper population under control. Grasshoppers seem to love laying eggs in our next door neighbor’s yard then happily hopping over to our oasis and eating whatever they desire.

Let’s just say once we let the chickens routinely do garden cleanup, the grasshopper population went way down. I know chickens don’t just come with insect eating beaks, they also come with destructive scratching feet and toes. Perhaps think outside the poultry box if you are able. Guinea fowl, while much louder, are not as destructive in the garden. Same with ducks, if you have the right space to keep them.

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Good Ole Squishing!

Do I need to explain to you how to squish a bug? Did you not have a childhood?

Kidding, love you.

But really, if you see a pest and you’re right there anyway… git it. I do this all the time with squash bugs and cabbage moth caterpillars. Or feed it to those lovely egg laying dinosaurs we call chickens if you have some.

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Now, obviously there are many, many more tips and tricks to manage pest pressure in your garden. This article was just the beginning and an overview of the methods that we utilize in our own garden.

Drop me a comment below and let me know if you have any pest-control tricks up your sleeve!

Happy Growing,

Becca