Herbs are for more than just making your food extra wonderful or supporting your health and vitality through tea blend infusions. Planted in strategic places in your vegetable garden, herbs repel certain kinds of insects without the use of harmful chemicals.
Try planting these herbs and flowers in your garden as preventative measures. If you get a really bad infestation, go to chemicals, but these plants can help prevent problems.
Here are a few bugs, and expert recommendations on herbs to plant for prevention.
- Ants: Pennyroyal, spearmint, southernwood, tansy
- Aphids: Garlic, chives and other onions, coriander, anise, nasturtium and petunia around fruit trees
- Borer: garlic, onion, tansy
- Cabbage moth: mint, hyssop, rosemary, southernwood, thyme, sage, celery, catnip, nasturtium
- Colorado potato beetle: green beans, horseradish, dead nettle, flax, catnip, coriander, tansy, nasturtium
- Cucumber beetle: tansy, radish
- Cutworm: tansy
- Flea beetle: wormwood, mint, catnip, interplant crops with tomato
- Japanese beetle: garlic, larkspur, tansy, rue, white geranium
- Leafhopper: petunia, geranium
- Mexican bean beetle: marigold, potato, rosemary, savory, petunia
- Mites: garlic, onion, chives
- Nematodes: marigold, salvia, dahlia, calendula, asparagus
- Rose chafer: geranium, petunia, onion
- Slug: rosemary, wormwood
- Squash bug: tansy, nasturtium, catnip
- Tomato hornworm: borage, marigold, opal basil
- Whitefly: nasturtium, marigold
Petunias, marigolds and geraniums can be planted in a border around the garden or trees. If you want the benefit of catnip without digging it out of your garden for years to come, put in a large clay pot and place nearby. For other pest prevention plants, thoughtful inter-planting of vegetables can help with the process.
Using herbs and flowers in this way can keep your garden "green" and prevent tears when you find your prized tomato plant cut off at the root by some nasty slug!
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