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Growing a garden behind or anywhere around your home is a perfect way to beautify the house, support a healthy environment, and cater to your love for natural plants. Indeed, barely anything in the world beats the feeling of growing a healthy garden, especially if you are a lover of nature and beautiful plants.
However, there are often challenges you have to contend with to grow a healthy garden. One of these challenges includes fighting off pests like caterpillars from your plants.
People often think that caterpillars are not very harmful to plants, especially as they appear cute and will soon turn into beautiful and colorful butterflies. Well, this opinion can not be any farther from the truth. Caterpillars are insatiable leaf-eating pests that can cause significant damage to your garden if care is not taken.
Thankfully, you can manage caterpillar infestation in your garden to prevent further damage. In this article, you will learn some helpful tips on how to get rid of caterpillars on ferns. Read on for more eye-opening information.
How to Detect Caterpillars on Your Ferns
As far as ferns and caterpillar infestation is concerned, it is essential to watch out for some symptoms of the infestation before taking action to get rid of caterpillars on ferns. Here are some of the symptoms:
- Stripped foliage: one of the symptoms you might notice in your garden during caterpillar infestation is stripped foliage, which means the loss or stripping of leaves from your ferns.
- Leaves browning: leaves in your garden begin to change into a yellowish or brownish color.
- Stem degradation: you might also notice a level of stem degradation in your garden if there is a caterpillar infestation.
- Holes in leaves: noticing holes or missing sections in fern leaves can also signify caterpillar infestation in your garden.
Once you notice these symptoms in your garden, it is most likely a fern caterpillar infestation.
How to Get Rid of Caterpillars on Ferns
Here are some really effective all-natural methods that can help you control the infestation of caterpillars in your garden:
1. Pick them out with your hands
One of the fastest methods of dealing with caterpillar infestations is handpicking them out of your garden. You can start by filling a bucket with hot water till it gets halfway. Then you can add a few tablespoons of organic dish soap to the water. After this, put on a pair of canvas or rubber gardening gloves, and off you go to your garden.
Start picking out caterpillars from your ferns in the garden, and ensure to carefully check underneath as many leaves as you can. As you pick the caterpillars, drop them one after another to drown in the bucket of warm mixture. Always ensure to use quality hand gloves for this method of removing caterpillars to protect your hands from being stung by caterpillar spines.
Perhaps, the only downside to this method is that it can be pretty time-consuming as you have to repeat the process many times till you get rid of every visible caterpillar in your garden.
2. Get rid of them with neem oil
Many garden owners regard neem oil as an efficient natural pesticide for fighting caterpillar infestation in the garden. Moreover, you can also use them to get rid of other garden pests like cabbage worms, tomato warms, etc.
For this method, all you need to do is dilute two ounces of the product into a gallon of water. After that, shake the water thoroughly and spray the mixture on the affected ferns. The mixture will get to the caterpillars and kill them off.
3. Destroy the caterpillars’ nests
Perhaps you want a more aggressive way to deal with the leaves-destroying pests bothering your ferns and sabotaging your gardening efforts. In that case, you can opt for destroying and emptying the caterpillars’ nests. These nests often appear in the form of silk-spun homes, hanging on plant stems on your lawn.
To destroy the nests, you just have to puncture them with either a broom handle or a long sharpened stick. When you have punctured the nest, you can go ahead to scrape or spin along its interior to eliminate all its inhabitants. After that, you can dispose of the caterpillars and nests in a bucket of warm water and soap mixture. This is so that they can drown in the mixture.
For more effective results, experts advise that you attack the nests late in the night or early in the morning when most of the pests will be inside.
4. Attack them with a chili mixture spray
This is another potent natural remedy that can help you get rid of caterpillars on ferns. It is also effective for dealing with other plant-eating worms, cabbage moths, and aphids.
For this method, you can start by mixing 3½ ounces of ground chilies with a gallon of boiling water and letting it boil for 5 minutes before getting it out of the heat source. After that, add another ½ gallon of cold water to the mixture, alongside 3 drops of mild dish soap.
Shake the mixture thoroughly and let it cool for some hours. Spray it on a small section of your garden and wait for 24 hours to see if it will adversely affect your plant. If not, you can go ahead to spray on the other parts of your garden.
Conclusion
Dealing with caterpillars in your garden does not have to be too difficult. The simple tips discussed above will help you get rid of the pests, so your garden can be truly healthy.
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