Episode: 1
Title: Natural Pest Control Ideas
Broadcast: March 2 2019
Presenter: Trevor Cochrane

No matter what the season, there’s always some pest just waiting to demolish your veggies or raid your amazing fruit crops. Trevor has a few do-it-yourself, all-natural and organic ways to keep those bugs at bay.

• There’s plenty of organic and natural products out on the market today to help keep your garden pest-free, but there’s also some very easy home remedies that you can try making yourself!
• Snails love the leafy green Autumn and Winter veggies, especially the seedlings, and there’s nothing more upsetting for a gardener than seeing their baby lettuces decimated overnight. Beer can be hard to share, but snails love it. Take a small container, set it on the ground, pour in the beer and watch as they come in droves.
• Make sure you keep the container lip a few centimetres above ground level though, so as not to attract the wrong insects in. The slugs and snails will crawl up and over the container and fall in.
• Beer traps only attract slugs and snails from roughly a 1 metre radius, so lay a few traps down at regular intervals.
• Fruit fly can wipe out an entire crop with far too much ease, so it’s best to get on top of it as soon as fruit forms.
• Fruit fly is attracted to the colour yellow, so make sure your trap displays some bright yellow to entice them in.
• Perhaps the most popular fruit fly trap is the liquid based containers, which you can easily make at home out of old milk or soft drink bottles. Fill the containers a third of the way with a mixture of warm water, Vegemite and sugar; drill a few holes two-thirds of the way up and spray them with some yellow paint. Fruit fly magnet! Hang one container in each tree, or a couple if it’s a large tree, and make sure you change the liquid every other week.