All types of garden like vegetables, indoors, ornamental s, herbs, fruits and succulent garden are prone to pests and diseases. The key point should be considered by every garden lover is early detection and taking immediate action instead of going for pesticides.

Prevention is better than cure:

As the proverb says taking at most care in your garden prevents lots of pests and diseases

These are simple ways that can be done during visit time to your garden but keen observation is needed

The starting materials i.e. seeds and saplings should be free from pests and disease infection, by this you can think that you have passed the first level of gardening. Keep in mind that adaptive plants are less susceptible to diseases.

Cultural control measures of pests and diseases:

• Remove weeds regularly in your garden as they encourage more pests and diseases
• To keep the pest population low, ensure crop rotation.
• Using farmyard manure and compost in well-decomposed form, since there encourages lots of soil borne grubs and pathogens in soil
• Make sure that proper moisture condition is maintained in your soil
• Leave proper spacing between plants
• Prevent soil-borne fungal, bacterial or viral diseases by exposing soil to solar rays in summer – soil sterilization.

Mechanical control of pests and diseases:

• Hand removal of caterpillars, borers , eggs , larvae, slugs , snails etc
• Remove /prune affected branches or shoots, leaves or flowers, as needed.
• Remove affected plants to prevent spreading of diseases from one plant to another.
• remove old and basal leave as they encourages more pests and diseases
• remove the cotyledon leaves
• Give pressurized water spray for sucking type of insects without affecting plant

Use of traps for pest control:

• Sticky traps: Place bright yellow sticky paper traps in the garden to attract small flying insects like thrips, whitefly, aphids, etc.

• Pheromone traps: it’s a sex trap where we place lure to attract male insects, it works out well in fruit fly trapping

• Light traps: It is a device used at night in the field to collect moths and other flying insect pests.

Keywords: cultural methods, mechanical methods, traps, solarization, pincing, pruning

Write up by

Geethashree.S.G

Bsc.Horticulture