If you’re living the cosy gardener’s dream, you’re probably making the most of these sunny days by tending to vegetables, plants and flowers in your downtime.
This brings so much colour to your garden (or allotment) and is a great way to enjoy the outdoors mindfully, but what can you do when these plants are disrupted by aphids and other pests?
Well, according to Bertha Earth, an organisation dedicated to youth-centred environmentalism, the answer is sacrificial flowers or to be more specific, Nasturtium flowers.
These vibrant flowers are fully edible, offering a peppery kick to salads and garnishes but they can also provide long-term protection for your vegetable garden.
Nasturtium flowers attract pollinators like bees and butterflies which is ideal for surrounding pollination but they’re also attractive to aphids and cabbage white butterflies which often cause damage to your crops.
So, basically, if you want to keep your vegetable patch safe, grow these flowers as sacrificial plants to lure the harmful critters away from your beloved crops.
Additionally, if you grow trailing Nasturtiums, these make for great ground cover and keep weeds at bay.
Nasturtiums deter squash beetles, cucumber beetles and other vine boring pests so are an essential for your vegetable garden and with packs starting at £2.20 on Amazon, they’re a very cheap solution to a potentially very harmful problem.
Nasturtium protects against pests and improves crops
Nasturtium protects against a range of common vegetable garden pests including:
- Woolly aphids,
- Whiteflies,
- Pests that attack cucumbers, melons and squash.
Finally, as if these floral delights weren’t already incredible, planting them near radish plants can improve the taste of the vegetables once grown and planting Nasturtiums in the vicinity of the roots of fruit trees every year will help the trees to take up the smell from the Nasturtiums to repel pests.
Happy gardening!