If you are someone who can't stand to despoil your vegetable garden with a bunch of chemical pesticides, the whole gardening exercise becomes extra challenging.
It doesn't have to be that though.
There are several common sense solutions on offer if you happen to be a gardener who likes things to be natural and who enjoys toying around with nontraditional methods of protecting his crop.
It doesn't take a lot to fashion all kinds new natural pest control contraptions, to bring in the right counter-predatory measures and to use organic solutions to your problem.
It takes patience and a kind of glee in seeing how nature can be used to battle some of the problems that it creates.
Let's first get with a kind of pest that doesn't so much bother your plants as it does you as you toil away at your garden in the heat of summer weeding, digging and planting - we're talking about flies and wasps of course.
But gardeners wouldn't complain so much about the personal bother that they were if they weren't so bad for their plants.
Help is at hand with an ingenious design in a simple wasp trap you can make out of empty soda bottles though.
All you need would be a few clear plastic bottles with labels removed, and filled at the bottom with a little thick sweet syrup.
All kinds of insects will go in unable to resist the sweet, and will stay in there completely confused about how to make their way back out.
This is such a successful method that they even make decorative bottles with stands and other placement needs.
For pests that are not attracted by sweet syrup, organic pesticides exist that can help you in your quest for natural pest control.
What gardeners use is something called diatomaceous earth.
They mix it in with water and spray it all over their garden, especially over flowering branches.
Visiting insects will be turned away by the poisonous diatomaceous earth that tends to corrode them.
The only problem with these is that friendly garden insects like butterflies and ladybugs can be turned away too this way.
Natural pest control methods work with larger pests too - like rabbits for instance.
Have you ever tried to grow a vegetable garden with any rabbits around? They think it's a buffet set out for them.
The best way to keep rabbits or deer out of your vegetable patches would be to use wire cages built of chicken or rabbit wire.
You build a cage yourself to fit over each vegetable patch, and you should be safe.
A better way though would be to plant garlic all around your vegetable garden.
Lots of animals hate the smell, as do lots of people.
It's just a really smart way to deter animals from making their way in and thinking that there's something delicious there for them.