Lawn care and lawn pest control

In this, like most other activities, balance is the key. Balancing your lawns water and fertilizer needs with your mowing schedule, and balancing the right mowing height between too long and too short, will give your lawn the best look, and the best health. The best defense against insects, disease, fungus, and weeds is a healthy lawn. Like a healthy body, a healthy lawn will ward off attacks by invaders. Proper lawn care will give you a healthy lawn, which will in turn, give you, the best lawn pest control.

The list below gives a few details about  lawn care, as it relates to lawn pest control.

• Scalping your lawn, weakens the scalped area’s turf, and allows weed invaders to take the place of the weakened grass.
• Not mowing the grass at a low enough level, leaves cover for insects and allows some low growing weeds to reproduce seed under the mowing height.
• Thatch hides insects, and should be removed or cultivated, and not allowed to build up. Good mowing practices will stop it from building.
• Waiting too long between mowings, can allow weeds time to reach seed head maturity, and plant themselves in your nice green lawn. Too much growth also provides cover for insects.
• When you have waited too long to mow, change your mowing height, so that you take off less leaf blade, and then mow again in a few days at a lower cutting height. Do this in increments until you reach your desired cutting height.
• You should never remove more than one third of the top at a time. Taking too much off at once will leave your lawn in a weakened condition, inviting more bugs and weeds to take over.
• Avoid mowing weedy outside areas before you mow your lawn. If you have to do this for some reason, stop and thoroughly clean your mower between the two areas.
• Mow away from your landscape beds and toward your lawn. Care should be taken to avoid throwing grass, weed clippings, and seed into them.
• Don’t “over water” your lawn and landscape beds. Many weedy lawn pests, and bug pests enjoy excess water, and may decide to take up residence in the new sea side resort in your landscape. Over watering fuels fungus, and bacteria as well.
• Over fertilization leads to most of the same lawn care problems as over watering.
• Don’t fertilize your lawn too late in the year. If you do, you may be fertilizing winter weeds instead of grass. This will have a bad effect on your lawn pest control efforts in the spring.
• Avoid aerifying late in the fall. Aerifying at that time, will plant the weed seeds that would have otherwise rotted on top of the ground.
• Avoid lawn compaction. Areas with heavy foot traffic, are likely to have poor quality turf, and are subject to invasion by weeds that like compacted areas. If you have compaction, loosen it by aerifying.
• If the problem is human pests, and an area is getting so much traffic because it is convenient to walk in that direction, a good lawn care tactic might be to add a paved foot path through the area, or you could plant or build a traffic barrier to make it less convenient.

Good lawn care is great lawn pest control. See more on lawn care and lawn pest control on our lawn management pages.

Home pest control by attrition

Most people approach pest control as though at some point, if we kill enough of them, they will eventually go back where they came from.

There are a few problems with this theory:

• Bugs and weeds do not think, they only react, and their reaction will always be the same as long as nothing changes in their environment.
• The bugs and weeds are already where they came from. When we build a home, we are the interlopers in their territory, and we have displaced them. They will always try to get it back.

Pest control by attrition is a life long commitment to the war against “bugdom”. It is a series of battles that will go on forever, unless something is done to modify the environment. We are occupying territory that they once dominated, and they are always trying to reclaim it!

Home pest control by prevention

In order to make any progress in keeping our property free from these pest insurgents, we have to make our property less inviting, and less accessible to pests. In other words, we must modify our environment to favor us and not the pests. We must make it difficult for pests to gain entrance, and difficult for them to survive. We must create an environment that:

• Denies them what they need to survive.
• Exposes them to natural predation.
• Seals them out.

That is pest prevention in a nutshell.

The practice of home pest prevention

There is a logical sequence that should be followed for controlling home pests by preventing them. The practice involves removing the things that insects and rodents need to survive from the outskirts of your homes environment.

1. Start by clearing away any brush, weeds, rubbish, or rubble from your property. That is what insects use for cover, and for food. If you remove the cover, they will fall back to the next available cover, which will probably be your neighbors yard, so, you might want to share this with your neighbors. Now move toward your home. Remove the things that provide cover throughout your lawn, and mow your lawn more often. I know it is a pain, but it really helps. If the grass is high, insects and rodents use it to provide cover for getting closer to your home.
2. As you move closer to your home, look at your trees. If they are hanging over your roof, or touching your roof, they are providing a way for pests to get to the top of your house, so, trim them back. Don’t just cut the ends off, but trim them back to a lateral branch. If you do this improperly, you could cause an increase in pests, and disease in your trees. Keep your own safety in mind, use ladders cautiously, and pay special attention to power lines.
3. Your landscape beds next to your home are an important area for your pest control efforts. The typical landscape bed is a hotbed for pest activity. Keep vines away from the walls, they provide a road for insects. The same is true for the shrubs in the bed, they should be cut back a foot or more from the wall. Landscape mulch should be kept at least a foot from the homes exterior. This is not standard landscape practice, but it needs to be done.
4. Regulate your irrigation carefully. Too much water invites all sorts of critters into your place. Too little can weaken the lawn, and invite weeds to live in the place of the lawn grasses and landscape plants.
5. Now, to the exterior of your home. Seal everything! cracks, openings around doors and windows, replace worn weatherstripping, caulk around frames, caulk around all pipes, wires, cables, inlets, and anywhere else a bug might get through. Make sure all eve and soffit vents are screened. The same goes for your dryer vent.
6. Do the same inside, with all the corresponding areas. Almost every hole in the outside will have a corresponding hole in an inside wall, and they should all be sealed.

Consider a lawn and landscape makeover

While going through this process, you should also consider major modification to your entire lawn and landscape. Don’t let the word major bother you, this is one area where a little change can be done over a long period of time, and have a major impact, without huge expense. In fact, this could save you money in the long run.

Encouraging natural predation can help lower insect populations. This can be done by adding native trees and shrubs, where lawn once existed, and replacing non natives with native plants in the existing landscape. The native plants will be less susceptible to pests, and the native birds will have more of a reason to hang around and eat the remaining bugs. See: Lawn And Garden: Less Lawn More Garden for more information.