Pest Management Tool Categories

In your garden you have beautiful plants, veggies, and so forth growing. However, for various reasons some of these do not make it to harvest—whether that be for the salad, the vase, or other use. In our discussion of pest management (and we could expand that to be "problem" management, which would include diseases and even weeds), we find a number of options for managing the problem. Today we will discuss the five main categories of pest management tools available in our toolbox. These include preventative, genetic, physical/mechanical, biological, and chemical options; and as we integrate them together, we can minimize the negative impacts that these problems cause in our gardens.

Preventative tools should be the most common and broadly used tools in our gardens. These are tools that prevent the problem from arising in the first place. Examples of this are the purchase of clean seed or soil mixes so that weed seeds are not introduced into the garden, washing hands and cleaning tools so that we do not spread contaminants from one plant to another, destroying diseased plants so they don't contaminate the rest of the garden, etc.

Genetic tools include the selection of plants that are immune to certain problems. For example, a "deer-resistant" plant survives in the garden because the deer don't like it—it may be poisonous or just taste bad. Likewise, a tomato plant that has a "VFFNTA" on its label, will have resistance to a number of common tomato diseases. (In our example the letters stand for Verticillium, 2 races of Fusarium, Nematodes (particularly root-knot nematode), TMV virus, and Alternaria). When we can purchase plants with resistance to diseases (or other pests) in our area, we can avoid those problems.

Physical and mechanical tools are those tools that we use that manage a pest by a mechanical means (like a mower) or physical separation (like a row cover), or physical as in "physics" means (like using heat in flame weeders or vapor for soil sterilization). Additional examples of these include mowers and tillers, UV greenhouse plastic, mulches (plastic and organic), fencing, tractor implements, etc. Pests cannot evolve to overcome them, but they are often expensive, have negative impacts (like soil erosion or compaction), or broad spectrum (affect good and bad life alike), so they need to be used carefully.

Biological tools are those that take advantage of the natural balance of life and its regulatory processes. These include the use of predatory insects, birds, reptiles, bats, etc.; the planting of refugia to attract and maintain these beneficials (as we discussed in detail last week); the use of high-quality organic matter to improve soil biology and soil-life regulation, etc. For biological tools, it is important that they work through regulation, not absolutes. For example, if we hope to have beneficial spiders or wasps in our gardens, which will eat the pests, then we also have to accept the fact that there will be food for those same spiders and wasps (i.e. the pests), otherwise the beneficials will either leave or die. Hence it is an issue of accepting low-level populations of pests, that are present but below damaging thresholds. Further, beneficials are sensitive to other tools (such as chemical sprays or flame weeding), so we need to be careful as to how we use them.

Chemical tools are most effective to restore balance when pests have escaped the regulatory balance of the garden. Here the pesticide is used to "knock-down" the pest population and can serve as a very quick and effective method of treating symptoms. However, chemical tools tend to be "band-aid" tools, in that we need them when the rest of the ecological balance is unable to regulate the pests within its own means, and the pest escapes that natural control. Accordingly, as we use our chemical tools we also need to identify the cause of the problems that allow the pest to increase to damaging populations. Once the cause is identified we can work to solve that, rather than continue applying band-aids to the symptoms of the problem.

As we practice integrating these five sets of tools together, we can manage pests using the entire range of options at our disposal. As we prevent pests from arising through clean gardening practices and appropriate genetics, and then manage them with appropriate physical/mechanical, biological, and chemical tools, our gardens will bloom and fruit more successfully.

Send your gardening questions to: info@meadowview.com and we'll do our best to assist you.

Meadow View Growers

34 years of growing for you

www.meadowview.com.

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