Homely remedies for common problems – Taken from ‘Make Your Garden Feed You’ published 1947

To free your garden from insect pests, keep a water tortoise, or a hedgehog

A piece of carrot or potato fixed on a cleft stick and stuck in to the ground will attract wireworms – after a while pull up the stick and burn the bait with its harvest of wireworms.

Make a wash from a teaspoon of salt in a gallon of water –destroys white butterfly grubs of cabbages and other greens.

Turnip sawfly – a disastrous maggot – can be eliminated by seeping the plants lightly with a handbrush, causing the grubs to fall off, when they will die of starvation.

To prevent bean and pea weevils, immerse seeds in water before sowing and discard those which float.

Top dress celery plants with a mixture of soot and salt to prevent celery fly.

Here’s some other ideas…………..

Carrots or potatoes (not good ones) on sticks – wireworm traps

Soot – left for at least two months – fertilizes, and deters celery beetle – top dress in spring or summer

Wood ash – general fertilizer

Stop cabbages going to seed – insert matchstick in stem

Bury short bits of drainpipe near wall over compost when planting tomatoes near or under the rainshadow

Fertiliser includes feathers, sludge,

Liquid manure – place a bushel of horse manure in a sack then suspend in bucket or barrel, use diluted to colour of weak tea

Early potatoes grow in leaf mound weighted down with hazel hurdle filled in with bracken cut in autumn

Catch crops – lettuce, radish, cress

Seedbed – brassicas, leeks

Straw stuffed into flowerpots on sticks – earwig traps