Even if you do everything right when building a healthy garden, pests inevitably show up. But managing your garden with a thoughtful, proactive approach helps prevent pests from doing serious damage. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) combines different types of controls — from hands-on pest removal to traditional synthetic pesticides — in a sensible, long-term plan. Designing your own program around proven IPM principles can help protect your garden and keep it healthy.
Managing Garden Pests Through IPM
IPM sees your garden and its pests as part of a larger ecosystem and manages both with the big picture in mind. By creating an environment that's inhospitable to pests, you can take away their advantage and give it to your plants.
Under IPM, a pest is any organism you don't want around. This not only includes harmful bugs, but also weeds, disease-causing pathogens and uninvited critters. Effective, integrated pest management includes the following tasks:
- Identify good and bad bugs.
- Monitor pest activity regularly.
- Set thresholds for tolerable pest damage — with limits!
- Establish a plan before pests cause concern.
- Take prompt, effective action when needed.
A solid IPM program wards off pests, but it has minimal impact on the environment and beneficial garden creatures such as birds, bees and butterflies you want to stick around.
Balancing Pest Controls in Your Garden
Cultural pest controls start with the decisions you make when choosing and caring for plants. Prevention is your first line of defense; healthy, nurtured plants resist pests and diseases better than weak, unhealthy plants. Cultural controls in good IPM programs include these simple recommendations:
- Choose plants suited to your area and its challenges. Arid, drought-prone regions, for example, call for water-wise plants with low moisture needs.
- Select disease- and pest-resistant plant varieties. Plants proven to withstand your region's most common pests hold up better under attack.
- Plant at appropriate times. In many regions, fall is prime planting time. Fall and winter planting allow roots to establish before summer heat arrives. This is especially important in southern or western regions. In far northern climates, spring planting is often best for plants with less cold hardiness.
- Choose proper sites. Plants have more problems and fail to thrive in inappropriate conditions. For example, sun-loving plants are more vulnerable to pests and other problems when planted in shady areas, and vice versa.
- Maintain lawn and garden tools. Sharp mower blades and proper mowing heights lead to healthier lawns. Sharp, sterile pruners help prevent the spread of disease.
- Avoid overhead watering. Some leaf diseases, such as common garden fungal diseases or black spot on roses, spread with the help of water. Water the soil at the base of plants, instead of watering leaves.
- Water in early morning. If leaves do get wet, they'll dry thoroughly before evening.
- Test your soil pH. A simple soil test reveals adjustments that can help your soil's structure and nutrients, so you can feed plants right.
Knowing what your plants need — and providing all they require — gives you the upper hand over pests. Simple, common-sense cultural controls are integral to good IPM.
All pests, from weeds and insects to diseases, have natural enemies. A balanced pest management program conserves, supports and encourages those foes. Biological IPM controls include:
- Predator insects: Adult lady beetles and their larvae are voracious aphid-eaters. Green lacewing larvae feed on all kinds of pests, including mealybugs, whiteflies, mites and thrips. These and other beneficial bugs are probably already in your garden.
- Parasitic insects: Parasitic wasps lay their eggs on and in their living targets. Eggs hatch, and then feed inside the pest. A mummified aphid with a round hole in its back is evidence that parasitic wasps have been at work.
- Biological pathogens: Bacillus thuringiensis, also known as Bt, is a soil-borne bacterium that fights mosquitoes and insects in the larval, caterpi