#ipm

[thafreedomwall]

[growingwildgardens]

If I ever give one single gardening tip you listen to let it be this:

STOP POURING RANDOM SHIT ON YOUR PLANTS!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't pour that vinegar everywhere on your lawn to kill a dandelion! Don't use that "all-in-one herbicide pesticide fungal spray" with 10 types of poison to cure 1 single problem with your tree "just to be safe." Dont use that agricultural brand pesticide not meant for individual use thats literally illegal to be using.

If you have a problem, spraying poison (yes even vinegar or "natural solutions") indiscriminately is going to do more harm to EVERYTHING than good. That vinegar is going to kill everything, including your lawn and the soil pH and microbes in it. That all-in-one broad spectrum mix of poisons is going to kill every good insect that comes into contact with it too, including the ones pollinating your fruit trees and bushes, and might even be the wrong concentration/targeted solution for your actual problem. Pesticides branded for ag use are at VERY DIFFERENT concentrations and use rates and DANGERS than the one specifically meant for individual use and pose a great danger to you and your neighbors, especially when misused (as is likely!!).

If you have a problem, identify it FIRST. Its not "all pests at once" its probably 1 or 2 specific guys, and if its a small population most won't harm a mature plant and predatory insects can pick them off. Its not "every disease ever" its a blight or a mildew or a fungus and these have different best responses - for fire blight in apples you'd want to cut a good 18" below any affected branch. For leaf curl (fungal) in peaches you'd focus on opening up the branches to better airflow and light, and if severe enough use a copper spray in the winter when buds are still dormant and insects aren't feeding on them anyways. For aphids you can plant dill or fennel nearby and attract dozens of ladybugs, a main predator, to eat them while also bringing tons more pollinators to your trees. For a certain weed taking over, you want to look at what its indicating - does it only grow in compacted soil? Very wet and shady spaces? Why are the things you WANT to be growing there not battling against them, is it a soil imbalance? Pests? Is it 1000 berries from your neighbor's invasive tree hanging into your yard?

The answer is rarely one thing, its about looking at the conditions and habitat around the plants to figure out why this problem started and what can be changed to fix it and set things up better in the future. If things are severe enough then using targeted pesticides or insecticides MEANT FOR INDIVIDUAL NOT COMMERCIAL USE may be the right call! But its only going to be part of the answer. You can read about Integrated Pest Management if you're interested in the topic.

You're not alone in figuring out what the answers are!!! If you're in the US, your local university extension should have tons of info on these things. You can reach out to your local master gardeners with pictures and questions and get specific, targeted answers from people whove studied these things. There's really great resources on most noxious weeds and how to remove them, or big known pest and plant disease problems. Just please, please stop trusting random Facebook gardeners on dousing your entire yard in vinegar or spray for a crane fly problem that may not even exist. And if you do spray, do it on days that aren't windy or hot to prevent it from spreading to neighboring plants and yards.

[easternblocrelics]

InterPress Magazine Where everything is bigger Yearbook 1987

[conservallama]

These bastards just won't die.

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[botanist-cool]

Ended up meme’ing one of my Vole Experts, Jasper! An amazing IPM Specialist in his own right.

[sylvanpossum]

not to be a horticulturist on main, but sometimes as helpers for our environment we should be checking that our solutions to some ecological problems line up with Integrated Pest Management principles (or whatever other principles are ecologically sound for the issue at hand. not everything's pests)

in this case i'm thinking of the people who insist we can cause the extinction of the malaria-vector mosquito species with little-to-no ecological fallout. i'm thinking about how in my plant pest class we learned how so many unaffected ash trees were felled in the U.S to "prevent the spread" of EAB but that just spread EAB farther by forcing the borer to fly farther to find new host trees.

i'm thinking about how we learned it's not realistic nor helpful to try to focus on exterminating a pest; that doing so just perpetuates ecological damage.

i don't know a whole lot about mosquito ecology but they sure do make up a significan portion of several species diets that i know of, especially in their larval form. additionally, the vast majority of mosquito species are harmless to humans and feed on nectar. because they're so hated, they're not as well-studied (in a neutral light) as they should be. but extermination of just the malaria-vector species is neither possible nor helpful, as it draws attention from: actually properly managing the pests.

[thee-morgie]

Oh hey I wrote a thing on integrated pest management for class

[omarfor-orchestra]

Raga ma wait a minute