10 bug-fighting basics for the garden

There are literally thousands of types of leaf-eating bugs, beetles and root-chewing grubs that may infest your yard, lawn and garden. But with due diligence and some home remedies and natural repellents, you can usually take care of the problem.

If you can't learn to live with the few that don't respond to environmentally friendly repellents, use chemicals only sparingly and always take precautions to protect yourself and beneficial insects that feed on other bugs.

• Keep a bar of soap next to your outdoor water faucet. When you wash your hands, rinse them into your watering can.
• Then, when you water your plants, they'll get a nice dose of soap, which is a mild insecticide that kills soft-bodied bugs.

It's the best way to make sure that surviving pests from last year's garden, which waited through winter in the soil, have a hard time finding the plants they most like to eat.

Combine 250 millilitres (one cup) each of water, vinegar and sugar in milk jugs hung from tree limbs, and you'll collect lots of insects that mistake the mixture for ripening fruit.

Make a fly trap from the same mixture and put it in jars whose lids have punched holes just wide enough for the flies to get through.

• Place the traps on your deck or porch so the flies are caught before they come into your house.

Too many June bugs? Although they don't eat plants, their larvae damage the lawn and they make spending evenings outdoors unpleasant.

• On a rainless night, fill a large tub with water and place a lamp or shop light over it.
• Turn the light on after dark, and many of the June bugs that fly towards it will accidentally drop into the tub.

Shiny silver mulch helps prevent thrips and other insects from finding your plants because as they pass by, they're confused by the light and fly away.

• You can make your own reflective mulch by placing sheets of wide, heavy-duty aluminum foil around plants and anchoring them with stones.

• Soak 1.5 kilograms of rhubarb leaves in four litres water for 24 hours.
• Bring the water to a boil and let it simmer for 30 minutes.
• Add 25 grams (1 ounce) of laundry soap flakes and let it cool before spraying it on bug-ridden plants.

Use eggshells to repel a wide range of garden pests.

• Crushed eggshells deter slugs and snails, and a layer of shells placed around onions and cabbage helps to discourage root maggots.

Use floating row covers, a garden fabric spread over plants, to prevent damage by secretive critters that you rarely see, such as the moths whose larvae become squash vine borers, or flies, whose eggs hatch into beet leaf miners.