Keep Pests from Munching on Your Plants, the Natural Way

Hello everyone!  For a while there, an as-of-yet-unidentified pest was eating my bell pepper plant's leaves.  Not wanting to use some sort of chemicals to keep insects away (Maeby likes to lick the water off of my plants' leaves), I searched for a less toxic solution.  As it turns out, a little Epsom salts and water in a spray bottle does the trick.  Mix 1-2 tsp of Epsom salts with some lukewarm water, shake, and spritz away.  You don't need to soak the leaves, and you don't need to do it every day, but it does seem to help!  My bell pepper plant is growing like crazy, and whatever was eating it before seems to have been repelled.  

See?  Growing like crazy.  There are no peppers on it just yet, but there are flowers, and I'm hoping that this little green nub is the start of a pepper.  

Does anyone have any thoughts?  I've never grown peppers before, so I'm not sure what it looks like when the fruit starts to set.

The rest of my little container garden is flourishing, as well.  It's starting to feel like summer in Baltimore, with temperatures in the 80s and 90s, which I'm pretty sure has helped.  

My Meyer lemon tree, while still more of a twig than anything, has grown so much that it now needs to be supported by a wooden skewer and some twist ties.

As usual, the basil is flourishing, and my tomato plants are out of control.  

Both plants have a lot of green fruit, but the Better Bush has a red one on the vine.  AND...

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I was able to pick my first tomatoes yesterday!!  They don't know it yet, but later today they'll be turned into a Caprese salad, along with some fresh mozzarella that I picked up at the farmer's market today and some of my basil.

I'm hoping that these will be just the first of many more tomatoes that we get to enjoy this summer.  And judging by the amount of flowers on each of the plants, we'll soon have more than we know what to do with.