Whatever variety your garden and landscape plants might be, they can become host to a diverse range of insect and mite pests under even the best of conditions.
A very broad category of pests, nuisance pests include insects such as fleas, ticks, spiders, chiggers, earwigs, ants, slugs, snails, tent caterpillars, and centipedes. And more than a simple nuisance, these pests frequently transmit infectious diseases, trigger allergic reactions among humans, and cause damage to your lawn and landscape plants.
Usually, a homeowner’s first defense is a healthy plant grown with proper watering and fertilization. However, sometimes more active measures are needed. But, homeowners can experience difficulty in controlling these pests themselves: often, they don’t observe the problem until infestation and damage are extensive, or the homeowner may apply insecticides incorrectly and/or at the wrong time.
To start, closely inspect landscape plants during the growing season, weekly, looking for emerging pest presence. Because many insects and mites are tiny in size and often found on the undersides of leaves, a close and thorough inspection is necessary to notice these pests. If you find a developing pest population, you’ll need to know what kind of pests they are before trying to control the problem.
Broad-spectrum insecticides can kill all insects, whether they’re beneficial bugs or problem pests. Use a common sense approach: begin with the least-toxic methods first, such as barriers, repellents, beneficial insects, biological pesticides, soaps, oils. Then, only if necessary, consider using botanical insecticides. And when making that decision, consider contacting a lawn, tree, and shrub expert like NexGreen before proceeding to make sure the correct remediation, specific to the infestation, is applied.
