Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Gardening: Cedar Chips = Organic Insect Control

Completely off my normal topic line. But a useful gardening trick.

I am an avid gardener. My wife and I plant a large garden and we typically preserve a couple of hundred quarts of veggies each summer.

Our garden is not strictly organic, but we always try to use organic methods first, and fall back to stronger non-organic methods as a last resort.

One of the toughest problems we had was keeping the insects from destroying the leaves on our green beans. The leaves would be devistated within days of the plants sprouting. I hated to do it, but we ended up dusting the green beans several times a year with chemical insect repellants.

Last year I was at the Tractor Supply Store getting some compressed wood chips that we use as an organic mulch, when I spied a similar bag of Cedar Chips that were labeled as odor control dog bedding.

the light bulb went off in my head. What would happen if I put some cedar chips in the normal wood chips that I was putting around the green beans.

The result was miraculous. A couple of hand fulls of cedar chips spread over one of our raised beds caused the insects to leave the bean plants completely alone.

Having insect problems in your garden? Make a trip to your nearest pet food or animal care supply store and give this a try.


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