What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Today we're talking about a really interesting and creative pest prevention technique that technically doesn't really prevent the pest at all and so we're talking about something called trap cropping and I think you may understand a little bit of what I'm

about to cover just by the name but basically it is a veggie garden planning strategy where you are

planting something that the garden pests that you're struggling with, let's say

aphids, like more than the crop that they are on currently.

And then what you'll do is you will say,

okay, I'm giving them the food that they really like

that I don't care about.

Then I'm going to uproot and I'm going to remove that trap crop and destroy all the pests that are on it.

And what you're doing there then is you are taking all of the potential breeding out of that pest. You're removing potentially hundreds, thousands of

aphids, right? And you're saying, okay, well you're all going goodbye forever and

so you don't have the ability to reproduce and I'm knocking down the amount of overall if it's in the garden.

For example, if you're growing nastertiums, for some reason nastertiums are really prized by aphids.

So if you plant nasterschims near the plants

that your aphids are typically infesting,

they may be drawn towards the nasterschims instead.

So that's going to save the plant. But then what you can do is you can just

pull that trap crop and destroy it. And then you've, of course, coincidentally, destroyed all the

aphids as well.

Another thing you can do is bury them in the middle of your compost pile if you don't want to

like burn or throw it in the trash.

Another thing you can do is put a bag of some kind around that trap crop and you will bake the

pests and so they'll dye of heat so that's a lot of the technique there.

...