My #1 advice for outside home garden pest is to strive for management, not elimination.

Aside from nasties you don't want near your garden (vine borers, etc) your garden can live with small aphid infestations and likewise.

Elimination is nice, but you will drive yourself crazy trying to keep up with it. It also keeps beneficial insects/bugs who would do a little work for you away because there's no good places for them to eat or lay their young to eat.

Work your garden, but don't let it work you too much.

Light weight floating row covers at planting time can exclude insects from your young plants.

Hand picking larger insects is effective but labor intensive. I hand pick squash bugs, Japanese beetles and cucumber beetles every year.

Jon

Does anybody have some good preventative maintainace steps or products that can help me keep the bug activity low

I'm sorry but it is your mindset that is the problem and not the bugs. ;) And it is a mindset you need to try to change to garden successfully. Your underlying assumption is that you can't have a healthy garden if it has bugs in it and that simply isn't true.

Bugs are a natural part of gardening. Accept that. And 90% of the bugs one sees in the garden are beneficials or at worst neutrals. Any attempt to "nuke" the garden even with natural organics, can kill all of the good guys as well. That is what results in an unhealthy garden.

If you see a bug, first assume it it a good guy or at least a no-problem guy. Then ID who and what it is. Then, if you see some plant damage, you will know if some sort of treatment is needed or not and what that treatment should be.

But one should never apply any sort of blanket treatment to the whole garden just in case a bug might wander by. ;)

Dave