Protect Your Garden - Eco Friendly Solutions

The garden season will soon be upon us and with flowers and veggies come pests and diseases. Not all that happens in the garden are good things, nature has it's own agenda but with a little knowledge you can learn the good pests  from the bad. And if you're growing veggies you will certainly want to use eco-friendly solutions as the trend in health consciousness continues.

A terrific new book that offers great identification and solutions is "Ed Rosethal's Protect Your Garden, Eco-friendly Solutions for Healthy Plants." This easy to read book covers topics like Pests, Diseases, Nutrients, Environmental Stresses, and Controls. I love the format of the book which is so beneficial for new gardeners. Great close-up photos make identification of pests and diseases easy. For each problem questions are asked: How common are the pests? What do they look like? What kinds of plants do they attack?Where are they found on the plant? What do they do to the plant?  And then to help you remedy the situation there is Exclusion and Prevention followed by Controls and Beneficial Biologicals.

The book covers most of the common pests and diseases and you can rest assured that the control methods are both eco-friendly and safe for your plants, family and family pets. As I work with community gardeners many of whom are new to gardening, learning how to prevent garden problems is high on their list. For our Demonstration Farm in Kenya and the many subsistence farmers we work with over there, learning eco-friendly solutions to garden problems is something we are constantly being asked for. And the photos in the book are very good for helping farmers to clarify their agricultural problems.

 

 

There are some things in nature that you just can't control but for other problems a little knowledge on plant, pest and disease life cycles can result in applying eco-firendly solutions to keep your garden healthy and producing productively. Ed Rosenthal's Protect Your Garden book is a great resource title to add to your garden library.