5 Startlingly Easy Ways to Eliminate 90% of Garden Pests

Pests aren't much of a problem in our gardens anymore - today we share why! Come to SCRUBFEST II: www.thesurvivalgardener.com/scrubfest-2023/ Get Grocery Row Gardening: amzn.to/3RoCj5U David's Other Gardening Books: amzn.to/3PKLZGC Subscribe to the newsletter: thesurvivalgardener.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe/… Compost Your Enemies t-shirts: www.aardvarktees.com/products/compost-your-enemies David's gardening blog: www.thesurvivalgardener.com/ Thank you all for watching. Enjoy the fall weather!

Excellent information. I've spent 40 plus years gardening without ever spraying anything and have always had plenty to eat (and share). I recently moved into the middle of BIG AG in Illinois. I have an acre and every year I;ve planted 10 shrubs and 3 trees around the perimeter. After just 4 years, I've gotten my FIRST EVER praying mantis. We have a fine "crop" of bumblebees now too. It's exciting to see the changes in just a few years. I feel like I'm giving Big Ag the Illinois salute (middle finger--ha!)

Wish I could walk around your garden. I'm 71 years of age. Grew up on 5th generation small farm of 134 acres. Prople were judged how weed free and perfect the rows look in the garden. Now that I find it Impossible to keep the garden pretty and weed free I have about given up. 2 failed years trying to do the garden by myself. Wish I had known about your type of gardening years ago. It totally makes sense. All the farms had hedge rows where quail, phesants, rabbits all thrived. Not only did all of that vanish but now I'm surrounded by 2,000 acres of solar pannel fields. Glad I'm 71 and not 17. So sad ! Keep up the good work young man.

My friends the wasps do such a thorough job cleaning my plants I barely get to see even the charismatic caterpillars like swallowtails. And they're very chill around me as I work. I heard of some research suggesting that wasps can recognize human individuals and whether or not they've been aggressive towards wasps in the past. I have some native asters that volunteered around the border of my pumpkin patch and see SUCH a DIVERSITY of pollinators on them. bumblebee, honeybee, wasps, native sweat bees, pollinating flies, beetles, and butterflies!

Grew pumpkins under tobacco on heavily mulched ground this year, and fed them a solution of fetid swamp water, pee, and water every week. Very little insect pressure and incredible production.

Regarding #3. I learned this the hard way when my family and I spent a year caretaking a small banana farm in Costa Rica. I brought a ton of seeds with me, thinking I was going to have the best garden ever. I ended up having the worst garden ever, the only thing that did well was okra. We quickly learned to forget about our usual staples like tomatoes and corn , and learned to harvest and use yucca, taro, and yams…things that wanted to grow there. I couldn’t grow herbs to save my life, but culantro grew like dandelions everywhere. Even now, that we’ve been back in the US almost 15 years, one of our favorite meals is “Costa Rica Spaghetti “ which is basically a bolognese sauce flavored with cilantro (which is a poor substitute for culantro, but as close as we can get). Now we’re in Missouri and I’m learning to appreciate dew berries, persimmons, nettles, and ramps because that’s what grows easily here.

This year I got toads! The funny thing is, before they showed up there were tons of caterpillars! You can actually see the toads eating stuff around the garden around dawn. Now the only plants that are still getting eaten are in a tall raised bed that the toads can’t get to.

God bless You !!! you made me feel so much better about my wildness. I love the offense strategy. I realize I made an accidental eco system by placing wood pallets upright around a little tree that was struggling with sun scald and wind abuse. I look out my window and watched my wild little birds hiding in it from the hawks. growing onward with a smile.

I love this info! Makes me feel less pressure to have everything "perfect"🙂

My granddaughter was worried about some holes in some salad leaves we were picking once. I told her it was OK and we could eat the holes...😀

I hung up a bird feeder & fresh water supply in my back yard, 100's of wild birds soon inundated my yard, can you guess what happened to all my garden pests?

I used to live in San Francisco, in an apartment down the hill from a small grocery store. One day I bought a cabbage at the store and when I opened it up at home, it had a big old, fat old, squiggly caterpillar in it. I stormed up the very steep hill, cabbage in hand, and showed it to the store owner. He kinda laughed and said, "That's how you can tell a plant can support life, your life." Haha... I saw his point. That was 40 years ago, so I guess they still sold organic produce, without fanfare, in markets in San Francisco. Yes, gratitude for bugs is the attitude in an organic garden. Sharing is caring. :)

Great video David! You put together the lessons it took me years and tons of wasted money to figure out into a short sweet video. I hope more people see this video and take the lessons to heart. It will save them all the time and money wasted trying to reproduce a commercial farm in a garden setting. Big farms equal big inputs! Blessings to all of you!

I used ‘chemicals’ twice this Spring/Summer, two doses of Spinosad on a 5’ X 8’ bed of sweet corn. I’m on a .25 acre lot in the N Texas exurbs and I’ve been growing groceries (chickens, fruit, veg, herbs) for five years. My entire backyard is now a food forest. Three years ago I decided a natural approach to dealing with garden pests was the healthiest, most effective way to go. I provide year round food and habitat for frogs and birds and my insect pest issues have dropped to nearly nil. Birds eat the bugs and frogs deal with snails and slugs. About three $15 bags of bird seed carries the local ‘flock’ through the winter and a 100 gallon plastic ‘pond’ with a little solar fountain pump is a perfect breeding area for frogs. About the only drawback to this system is that I end up sharing a good bit of my plums with the birds and squirrels, a trade I’m happy to make.

You are such a breath of fresh air, and i couldn’t possibly agree with you more. So dang sensible and so validating of my natural methodology. Thanks for putting your knowledge out there dude. I dig it.

It's working for me! Anyone that asks me what I do, I refer to your resources, books, videos. You are really on to something with this gardening formula and I, for one, thank you much. This has been my best garden yet, in 60 years of gardening. I'm currently doing fall cleanup and top dressing. Winter for Wisconsin is right around the corner now.

We have such a lack of pollinators that perhaps we ought not be spraying anything.

Thank you for making a video I can link to people every time I see someone on a forum somewhere that says, "I just started my garden and I have all these __ attacking my plants!" This coincides with the lecture that Dr. Dykstra gave with John Kempf, which is one of the most enlightening things I've learned. I stop looking at "how do I kill these bugs" and start looking at, "how can I improve this soil" and "What should I replace this plant with?"

I had 2 clusters of Okra with a Chaya plant between them. Deer only ate one cluster. I have pepper between my citrus hedge seedlings since that space is open for a couple of years. Hornworm only ate one pepper plant. In the past they went from nightshade to nightshade. Intermittent planting worked

My best cucumbers by far have accidentally grown in my compost pile for 2 yrs running now.