If your idea of a backyard pest is the guy next door who can't rake leaves, wash his car or grill a hamburger without a very, very loud radio... take heart. It could be worse. Much worse.
Even though it's not always apparent to the naked eye, your land is teeming with life: some good, some bad, some neutral. Your objective to control the bad without adversely affecting the good and the neutral.
With the exception of weeds and the neighbor with the radio your pest problems fall into two major categories: insects and disease.
I'll address disease in another column, so let's start with insects. For the most part, insects damage plants either by chewing or sucking. Chewing insects chomp away on the leaves and flowers of your plants, and some -- such as the Japanese beetle and the Colorado potato beetle are easy to identify. Other chewing insects are nocturnal, sleeping underground during the day and feasting away at night. If you notice that a previously robust plant has holes in its leaves in the morning, the culprit could be a species of nocturnal caterpillar known as a cutworm.
Sucking insects insert a probe into a plant to suck out the juices. To make matters worse, they frequently spread diseases from one plant to another, rather like a mosquito can infect a human with malaria carried from its previous victim. Sucking insects include mealy bugs, aphids, mites and thrips. Their preferred location is on the underside of leaves. An indication of the presence of sucking insects is a plant with misshapen, curled or withered leaves. Turn the leaves over and that's where you'll find the little suckers. So to speak.
How do you get rid of insect pests? The simplest way, particularly with the larger ones, is to remove them by hand (wearing gloves or using tweezers) and drop them into a bowl of soapy water. You can also try washing insects off your plants using a garden hose or a sprayer. But be careful not to damage delicate plants with too strong a blast of water! And it's not just vampires who have an aversion to garlic: try crushing a clove of garlic and adding it to the water to your spray bottle. Or use a commercial product called Plant Pro-Tec Garlic that hangs on your plants. A great overall pest (insects) deterrent is combining two tablespoons of sugar to a quart sprayer of water. Insects cannot digest sugar in this form so they leave these plants alone. It’s especially good for herbs and vegetables that you want to eat and are hesitant to spray with chemicals. The plants absorb this mixture that is also beneficial to their growth. They may need to be sprayed every several days as the insects reappear, or after rainfall. Using insecticide sprays requires a great deal of caution as many are poisonous to both humans and pets, and you're likely to kill many beneficial insects as well as pests. For example, ladybugs control aphids and Colorado beetles, while green laceworms feed on mealy bugs, thrips, spider mites and aphids.
If you need more help with garden pests, I've provided some links at my website (see below). But I can't do much about your neighbor's radio.
The Plant Man is here to help. Send your questions about trees, shrubs and landscaping to The Plant Man or mail to: Steve Jones, "The Plant Man", P.O. Box 686, McMinnville, TN 37111. For resources and additional information, including archived columns, visit www.landsteward.org
QUESTION: We'd like to plant something that will shade our south-facing living room windows from the sun. What would work best for us? And we want to be sure we don't damage the house foundations with tree roots. How far from our wall should we plant?
ANSWER: When you need something that is fast growing and will not have a damaging root system I would suggest low story trees such as Dogwoods, Red Bud or some of the ornamental Washington Basin Cherries, such as Yoshino or Kwanzan cherry. Any of these will provide a nice shade effect while have a great show of color in the spring. All of these should be planted no closer than six to ten feet from the house foundation. To contact Steve Jones with your comments and questions, send e-mail to steve@landsteward.org
