Snails are an incredibly amazing naturally occurring pest; the average snail can lay up to 300 eggs per day during the laying season, and these eggs can lie in the ground for eleven years or more until conditions are right for them to hatch. It’s easy to see how a snail infestation can occur overnight, and a bad infestation can prove very detrimental to your garden.

Snails are a pest which truly demonstrate the ineffectiveness of a toxic chemical approach to pest control. While they will perish individually, over use of toxic chemicals will actually create the ideal habitat for snails and their eggs as it kills the soil and dries it out. The only way to deal with snails is through time and patience, and here are some ways to do it.

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What are the real issues?

Every once in a while I find that there are pests that really don’t do a lot of harm, especially when the campaign to get rid of them is weighed up against the damage they do. In this article, we are going to take a look at two of the most benign pests there are, the fruit fly and the silver fish. What exactly are these insects being persecuted for?

Fruit flies

Fruit flies seem a particularly ridiculous case as far as pests go. They carry no diseases, are not harmful, and don’t even make noise in big groups. The only knock on the fruit fly as far as problems go is that they tend to breed very quickly and their numbers become suddenly vast. This amounts to a visual problem more than anything else; a basic psychological abhorrence of the presence of so many flying insect. Of course you may also have an aversion to these little guys flying into your wine every time you pop a cork too, and that’s understandable. I think that fruit flies should be dealt with, but as household pest insects go they are not too bad.

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When it comes to picnic guests, few are as unwelcome as yellow jackets. The type that usually show up tend to be very aggressive insects who land all over your steak and become quite perturbed when you attempt to drive them off. Yellow jackets, also known as wasps, are one of the most dreaded “pest” insects around. You will notice that I put pest in quotation marks; that is because as far as pests go, people have relatively little to worry about when it comes to yellow jackets. We will look at some of the main concerns below.

Pain and suffering

Obviously, the number one cause reason for people to want to get rid of wasps is the pain that they sometimes deal out. Wasps are particularly nasty because they both bite and sting, and both weapons pack a powerful punch. Moreover, wasps don’t have the decency to perish after stinging like their cousins the honey bee, they can go on claming more victims.

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Part of the approach when it comes to integrated pest management is understanding how and why a pest species is likely to show up around your home or garden. Once you know what kind of foods a pest prefers and where it is likely to make a home, you can use the knowledge to create preventative measures so that the particular pests don’t show up in huge numbers.

It’s important to note that integrated pest management strategy operates with the fundamental principle that pest species will not be annihilated. For decades peoples have worked to eliminate designated pest species, and most efforts have led to spectacular failure, even increasing the numbers of pests that we wished to eliminate! IPM means using the least toxic approach to pest control and preventing pest problems by denying pests their ideal conditions.

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The new approach to pest control is known as integrated pest management, and it is all about understanding how pests work and using that knowledge to limit their numbers. Limiting pest numbers using the integrated system means selecting the least toxic means of control possible, in order to minimize the potential harm to organisms other than the pest involved.

Integrated pest management also means recognizing that in many cases, total elimination of the pest in question is just not possible. Even with the incredibly dangerous and toxic campaigns used for the last five decades or so, no pest was ever totally eradicated; part of the secret of being a good pest is to be resistant to a lot of forms of poison control and so on, and to reproduce so quickly that some portion of the population is bound to survive. Pest control today is more about managing a certain number of pests to ensure that they do not get out of control; fortunately small mammals such as gophers are easy to manage in this way, and unlike insects smaller rodents may actually have a local population wiped out or at least forced to go elsewhere with good management. And the key to this management is prevention.

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Spiders have a nasty reputation that is in every case undeserved. Even those spiders that are found in North America which pose a threat to humans aren’t nearly as dangerous as they are sometimes thought to be by people. It is true that spiders are pretty creepy looking and have some parts to their biology that make them fearsome, but it is important to remember that the very things that scare some of us when it comes to spiders are the things which make them effective predators.

Why do you want to keep that in mind? Because spiders are predators of insects, including every insect in the home and garden which we consider to be a pest. A healthy spider population will mean that the numbers of pests are kept right down. Still, no one wants to have a house or even a yard that is literally crawling with spiders, so let’s take a look at ways in which you can keep spider numbers down.

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Like many household insect pests, house flies are one creature that we will never be rid of altogether. Flies are adept at exploiting any slightly favourable living condition, and their breeding capabilities ensure that their numbers stay strong. Moreover, flies are naturally attracted to the by products of human life, our refuse.

This doesn’t mean that you have to put up with swarms of flies every year, but it does mean that you will have to get used to seeing the odd one around. Integrated pest management encourages the control of pest numbers, including those of the house fly, through limiting using the least toxic approaches (sprays and other poisons used on house flies are very ineffective) and through preventing pests from breeding continuously through good prevention practices. Here are some ways to ensure that house fly numbers do not get out of control in your home.

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Every year you will probably notice that at least twice, fruit flies seem to swarm around in your kitchen. Fruit flies are creatures that are very sensitive to temperature changes, and can only thrive in conditions that are neither too warm or too cold. That’s good news, because when conditions are ideal they can really get annoying.

You probably won’t be able to prevent fruit fly numbers from increasing around your home during the prime time of year; they often just seem to skyrocket in numbers. There are some things that you can do to keep the population from getting too out of control; let’s take a look at them.

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Few common insect pests are so annoying as the flea. A flea infestation means itchy red bites, and plenty of them, for humans and pets alike, causing general misery in a household at large. Some areas of the country are much more prone to flea infestations than others, particularly places where it is humid much of the time.

Integrated pest management means recognizing that we will never be entirely free of pests such as the flea, and instead of focusing on toxic annihilating measures (which are often ineffective and sometimes dangerous to us) focusing on ways to control pest numbers so that they do not become a problem. In order to do this, it is important to have an understanding of the biology of certain pests, where they live, and how they breed. Once this knowledge is gained, it is possible to enact strategies that will prevent pest population from getting out of control. Here are some ways to control flea numbers.

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For some reason, the green lawn has come to be a symbol of middle class and higher North American living. It seems like many of us are willing to take the strangest measure and sacrifice a lot in order to get that spot of green in front of our homes. Just take a look at many of the houses in the state of Arizona a decade or so ago: green lawns in a state that only gets rain for an average of one month every year means a high water cost and a very regulated schedule.

Today, the attitude about a green lawn is changing somewhat across the country, including in Arizona. The high cost of creating and maintaining that perfect emerald color, as well as the many chemicals that must be used in order to keep it looking that way, have made this symbol somewhat impractical. More and more people are turning to natural methods of lawn care to keep their green space green, or are just accepting the beauty of naturally occurring vegetation.

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