‘Murder in the Garden’ is best kept as the title of a TV show, the kind where every bucolic function ends with a body being discovered on the croquet lawn.

A nice shaggy toothbrush is a more effective pest controller in your own garden than poisons, daggers or whatever the current weapons of choice may be on TV shows. (As we don’t get TV, we tend to be a decade out of date on the murder method of the moment).

A shaggy toothbrush is great to rub off scale, those tiny beasties that begin green then mature into dark brown scales that turn the leaves half dead and release their toxins into the poor plant too.

Scale are easily rubbed off at the soft green stage. They are more stubborn when they mature but it’s still quicker to rub them off with a toothbrush than to go out, buy the spray, then use it. An oil-based spray risks burning tender leaves in hot weather, too.

Old toothbrushes are also excellent for rubbing aphids off cabbages or onion top or rose buds, removing tiny green caterpillars from the broccoli leaves, scraping pear and cherry slugs off the pear and cherry trees, unless the leaves are too tall to reach, in which case get a pump sprayer and whoosh the flour and water spray on to them. Or forget about them, out of sight and out of mind way up there, as once a pear or cherry tree is full grown they can cope with an infestation of saw fly larva, which is what the ‘slugs’ really are.

It’s gardeners who get all upset by them. Cherry and pear trees have been coexisting reasonably happily with sawfly larvae for many many millennia, with no humans getting their knickers in a knot about lacy brown bits on the leaves.

Try barriers instead of pesticides. As soon as the fruit sets on your trees or tomatoes start getting fat, cover the tree or tomato bush with fruit fly netting. It’s not really netting, so birds and bats don’t get caught in it, but it will protect your fruit from them, too, except the most determined ones. It does a reasonable job protecting trees from hail too, unless it’s extremely heavy, as well as keeping off caterpillars and codling moth, stink bugs and those pear and cherry slugs.

If your trees are too big to drape the netting over, try calico bags, slipped over clusters of fruit or trusses of tomatoes. If your trees are really big you may not need all the fruit on them anyway - we are delighted when the birds share eight cases of apricots and a 10-metre tree’s worth of apples. The contents of 20 calico bags are plenty for us. The same with quinces: we have 13 varieties but definitely don’t need 13 trees' worth of quinces. But 10 bags' worth, on 13 trees, is perfect.

There are many other barriers: trappit glue to put around your trees to stop ants climbing up; finely chopped hair around your seedlings to stop slugs or snails (you need to replace it often, as it breaks down into soil) or rounds cut from plastic bottles or milk cartons, pressed into the soil around the seedlings which not only keeps off slugs or snails, but cutworms too, if you press them deep enough.

If you really want to zap your pests, try a homemade flour and water 'glue spray'. Spray this on your bugs and they stop eating your plants. They stop breeding too. In fact, they stop doing everything. The birds can see them easily and learn that your garden is a good place to get some easy tucker. The glue washes off in the first rain or watering. As it may be some time before there is enough rain to clean the leaves, it’s probably best to plan a good leaf water the day after your spray. Glue spray is effective. It is also extremely ugly. But if you do feel like a touch of murder in the garden, it is the nicest way to do it.

Mix:

1 cup flour

I cup boiling water

Add as much cold water as you need to make the mixture sprayable.

Strain well to remove the lumps and spray at once.

WASH OUT YOUR SPRAYER WELL AFTER USING OR IT MAY BE GLUED UP FOREVER!

Glue spray may be sprayed with a small hand-held mister. Large trees will need a pump-action sprayer. If you spray often it’s worth buying these as they make spraying faster and much more thorough.