Dealing with common garden pests - The Derbyshire Benevolent Trust

Dealing with common garden pests

The wet and warm days of May have been great for plant growth, but they have also provided the perfect habitat for the growth of garden pests. Your seedlings should be well on their way at this time of year, putting on lots of new healthy green shoots. If they aren’t, then you may need to check to make sure there aren’t any small critters causing damage to your plants. Keep reading to find out more and how to tackle them.

Slugs and snails

The most common pest at this time of year is hungry slugs and snails. Eggs laid over winter will be hatching in great numbers and those babies will devour seedlings in a matter of hours.

You can identify slug and snail damage by finding the green tops of your seedlings completely missing, large holes in more mature leaves, and the remnants of a shiny, slimy trail on your plant or on the soil below your plant.

Whilst slug pellets are readily available in all large garden retailers, it is important to garden in a way which considers the wildlife which uses your garden, so slug pellets may not be the most suitable way to deal with this pest. One particularly effective way of dealing with slugs is the use of beer traps. Fill a shallow tray or dish with beer and partially bury this in your soil, leaving a 1cm lip so that other critters don’t fall in. Slugs will be lured into the trap, which you can then empty onto your compost heap.

Flea beetle

If you are growing brassicas, radishes, salad leaves or rocket then you may be finding them to be covered in tiny holes on the leaves. Crops damaged by flea beetle can recover – for example, the beetle will not affect the growth of your radishes below ground – but they are unsightly. The best remedy for flea beetle is prevention. Make sure that you sow and grow your crops under an insect-proof mesh to keep the pests out from the start of the season.

Aphids

Aphids, greenfly, blackfly and whitefly are all nuisance bugs which suck the sap out of your plant which causes the plant to weaken and produce stunted or distorted growth. But thankfully they are easy to spot early on if you regularly check your plants. Aphids can be dealt with quite naturally just by squishing them between your fingers. Natural predators of aphids include ants, ground beetles, earwigs and ladybirds, so try to encourage these into your garden. Aphids can, of course, be dealt with through the use of chemical control sprays, however these are indiscriminate and will also kill off any natural predators from your garden.

Caterpillars

Anyone familiar with growing brassicas knows how quickly a plant can be decimated by hungry caterpillars. Most commonly found are the small and large cabbage white.

The best way to protect your crops from caterpillars is to net them when planted. You should regularly check the undersides of the plants leaves for small yellow eggs and wipe them off before they have the opportunity to hatch. Green caterpillars blend in well to their surroundings so check your plants thoroughly and dispose of any caterpillars you find. If you don’t fancy squishing them, you can relocate them to a patch of nettles where they will be quite happy.

I’ve not received a password reset email?

Be sure to check spam folders, Some email providers may consider the email to be a spam email and automatically file it into your spam folder.

The email is not in my Spam folder?

Some email providers may have very strict spam blocking in place. If this is happening you can add our email address to your ‘white list’

To do this please follow the instructions in the below links, by choosing your mail provider and adding the email: “admin@derbyshirebenevolenttrust.com” to your whitelist.

AOL

Add the “admin@derbyshirebenevolenttrust.com” to your AOL address book:

Click the “Mail Options” menu and select “Address Book”.
Inside the “Address Book” window, click the “Add” button.
Inside the “Address Card for New Contact” window cut and paste “admin@derbyshirebenevolenttrust.com” into the “Other E-Mail” field.
Make our From address the “Primary E-Mail” address by checking the associated check box to the right of it.
Click the “Save” button.

If the mailing is in your SPAM Folder, you can open the email and click the “This Is Not Spam” button.

Gmail

Add the From address you want to receive mailings from to your Gmail Contacts List:

Click “Contacts” along the left side of any Gmail page.
Click “Create Contact”.
Copy and paste “admin@derbyshirebenevolenttrust.com” into the primary email address dialog box.
Click “Save”.

If the mailing is in your SPAM folder, check the box next to the mailing and click the “Not Spam” button along the top.

Hotmail/Outlook/Live

Add the From address you want to receive mailings from to your Hotmail Safe List:

Open your mailbox and click “Options” (upper right hand corner).
Click the “Junk E-Mail Protection” link.
Select the “Safe List” link.
Copy and paste “admin@derbyshirebenevolenttrust.com” into the dialog box titled “Type an address or domain”.
Click the “Add” button next to the dialog box.

If the mailing is in your “Junk E-Mail Folder”, open the email and click the “Not Junk” button.

You should also check that the mailing’s email address is not in your Blocked Senders list. You can find your Blocked Senders list by following the directions above and going to “Blocked Senders List” instead of “Safe List”. If you see the mailing’s from address on this list, select it and click the Remove button.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Add the From address you want to receive mailings from to your Thunderbird Address Book and configure your Junk Mail Controls to white list your address book.

Add an address into your Personal Address Book:

Click the “Address Book” button.
Make sure the Personal Address Book is highlighted.
Click the “New Card” button.
Under the “Contact” tab, copy and paste “admin@derbyshirebenevolenttrust.com” into the Email dialog box.
Click “OK”.

White list your Personal Address Book:

From the main drop down menu, select “Tools –< Junk Mail Controls..."
This will launch the Junk Mail Controls window that has two tabs: Settings and Adaptive Filter
Under the Settings tab, update the “White Lists” module by selecting Personal Address Book from the pull down menu and then check mark the box next to “Do not mark messages as junk mail”.
Click “OK”.

If the mailing is in your junk folder, right-click the mailing and choose “Mark –< As Not Junk".[/vc_column_text][/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title="Netscape Mail" tab_id="1498728551530-a54d18f1-2c51"][vc_column_text]Set up a filter to redirect the mailing you want to receive into your inbox:

From the Edit drop down menu, select “Message Filters”.
Click “New”, and give the new filter a name (e.g. “Whitelist”).
Change the drop down on the left to “sender” and the one in the middle to “is”.
Copy and paste username@domain.com into the box on the right.
Make the bottom two drop downs “Move to folder” and “Inbox”.
Click “OK”.
Make sure that your new filter is located at the top of the Message Filter list so it is run before any spam filter.

Outlook 2003/2007

Add the address you want to receive mailings from to your Safe Senders list:

On the Tools menu, click “Options”.
On the Preferences tab, click “Junk E-mail”.
On the Safe Senders tab, click “Add”.
In the Add address box, copy and paste in username@domain.com and click OK.

If you are using a different version of Outlook you can add the mailers From address to your Address Book. This can be done by opening the email, right clicking the From address, and selecting “Add To Contacts”. You can also access your Address Book via the tools drop down menu.

Yahoo

Set up a filter to redirect the mailing you want to receive in your inbox:

Open your mailbox and click on “Mail Options” (upper right hand corner).
Select “Filters” under the Management column.
Click the “Add” button on the Filters page.
In the “From header:” row, make the drop down “contains” and put the mailer’s from address username@domain.com in the box.
At the bottom of the page Click the “Choose Folder” pull down menu and select “Inbox”.
Click the “Add Filter” button.

If the mailing is in your Yahoo Bulk Folder open the email and click the “Not Spam” button. You should also check that the mailing’s email address is not in your “Blocked Addresses” list. You can find your “Blocked Addresses” list by clicking “Mail Options” and then clicking the “Blocked Addresses” link under the Spam column. If you see the mailing’s from address on this list, select it and click the “Remove Block” button.

Others

The most common way to whitelist an address is to add it to your address book, white list, or safe list. There is no universal way to whitelist an address, so if this is not an option, you will have to consult the help section associated with your email application. They should have instructions on how to whitelist an address there.