Natural Gardening: 5 Simple And Effective Remedies For The Vegetable Garden.
If you practice natural gardening to grow your own vegetables, you probably fear seeing signs of disease or pests on your crops. As soon as the first symptoms appear, it's important to act quickly to treat the plants and keep away destructive insects. Fortunately, some common products can help you solve various problems without chemicals. We have listed 5 simple and effective remedies for your vegetable garden.
1- Garlic against insects
Garlic is an effective repellent, not only against vampires! For those practicing natural gardening without pesticides, it provides a valuable alternative solution against various types of insect pests.
Garlic is the first of the 5 simple and effective remedies that you can use in your vegetable garden to repel strawberry flies, potato beetles, aphids, and bean mites.
To prepare a natural repellent, let a crushed garlic clove soak in a little rapeseed oil for a day. Add a tablespoon of black soap and then dilute this mixture in a liter of water. All that's left is to spray this remedy on the vegetables attacked by insects.
2- Coffee grounds against slugs
If you are used to preparing filter coffee or espresso using a percolator, keep the coffee grounds preciously!
This residual coffee powder is a valuable resource for gardeners as it can be used for composting and making liquid fertilizer. Coffee grounds are also a natural remedy used preventively to protect young salads from slugs.
This natural gardening tip is very simple to put into practice as all you have to do is sprinkle the coffee grounds between your young plants. The smell of coffee not only deters slugs but also caterpillars from your leafy vegetables such as salads and cabbages.
3- Black soap to treat sick plants
Black soap is a liquid soap made from vegetable oils such as olive oil or flaxseed oil.
This multi-purpose product can be used as a hygiene product, as a household cleaning product, and as a natural remedy in the garden. Thanks to its texture and natural composition, it allows for the creation of organic remedies to treat plants without chemicals.
Mix 2 tablespoons of liquid black soap with 2 tablespoons of rapeseed oil, then dilute this mixture in a liter of hot water. Let it cool before spraying this liquid on your sick plants.
This remedy based on black soap suffocates parasites such as aphids, scale insects on fruit trees, red spiders, and thrips. You can also use it in natural gardening to treat sooty mold attacks (a disease characterized by black spots on foliage).
4- Baking soda to protect tomatoes
One of the most dreaded diseases of tomatoes is late blight, a fungal disease that often develops during stormy summers.
Don't wait for this fungus to spoil your entire harvest, use another one of the 5 natural remedies for the vegetable garden preventively: baking soda!
Dissolve 4 teaspoons of baking soda and 2 teaspoons of liquid black soap in one liter of water. Spray this mixture once a week on your tomatoes to protect them from diseases.
This remedy based on sodium bicarbonate is more natural than Bordeaux mixture which contains toxic copper for earthworms and aquatic fauna.
5- Milk to protect zucchinis.
The last of the 5 natural remedies for the vegetable garden helps protect zucchinis and other cucurbits against powdery mildew.
As soon as you see the characteristic white powdery coating of powdery mildew on the foliage of your squash, cut off the affected leaves and make a spray with diluted semi-skimmed cow's milk at 10% in water.
In practice, mix 10 cl of skimmed milk in one liter of water and spray the foliage of your zucchini, pumpkin, cucumber, and melon plants. The fat in the milk forms a protective barrier against the fungal parasite.
You can actually practice this spray every 15 days as a preventive measure. Semi-skimmed milk is a more natural antifungal remedy than sulfur-based treatments.
