Protect your plants with effective pest and disease control strategies. Learn how to identify, prevent, and manage common garden pests and plant diseases.
The bucket sat in the shed for three days in July, and by then nobody in the house would go near it. Three eggs, a litre of water, the lid left loose. The smell sat somewhere between a drained pond and a fridge that had lost power. It also…
Eleven in the morning, late May. I was kneeling in the bean row with a soil thermometer when the ground under my right knee gave a hollow thump. Not a rock. Not a root. A…
Eleven holes in a strip of lawn four metres long. I counted them at half past six on a September morning, three nights after the first heavy rain of the season. Each hole was roughly 9 cm across and 6 cm deep. Every one had a neat lip of…
Seven ripe cherries hung on my Morello this July. I picked four. A blackbird took the rest, and it had learned the exact mornings I was slow. That bird was not cruel, and it was not greedy — it had found a food supply and settled into a…
Eleven sunflower hearts, none of them eaten, and a bucket-shaped hollow pressed into the gravel under the feeder hook. That is how a rat announced itself in a client’s garden last October. I had filled that feeder two evenings running. On…
Every gardener meets the same morning eventually. Something has been at the leaves overnight, and the plant looks worse than
Learn everything about aerial spraying for pest control, including aircraft types, spraying equipment, benefits, challenges, safety measures, and best practices
Two summers ago I watched a neighbour lose a bed of dahlias in nine days. The roots were fine. He had sprayed a lawn weedkiller along his grass edge, the wind picked up, and a fine mist drifted four feet into the border. The leaves cupped…
Deer are careful eaters, and that one fact explains most repellent failures. A whitetail does not walk into a garden and graze it flat. It samples. It takes a nip from one plant, drifts down the row, and comes back to whatever it liked…
Few jobs in the garden irritate me more than chasing molluscs. Over twenty seasons I have lost far more lettuce to slugs than to frost, drought or pigeons, and I have tried nearly every remedy the internet promotes. Some worked. Most did…
