pest control
What is an Insect Pest?
For purposes of this Fact Sheet, we classify insects and mites as pests based on their ability to damage vegetable plants and reduce your harvest from the home garden. Many insects, and all spiders, found in home vegetable gardens are beneficial and control of these insects is not recommended.
Monitoring Pest Insects in the Home Garden
Insects and mites can move into your garden and then rapidly increase in numbers. You should examine plants in and around the garden throughout the season at least twice weekly. Use magnification to aid in identifying insects and mites. Examine a few plants of each cultivar thoroughly, searching under leaves, inside developing fruit, along stems and at the plant crown. Note feeding damage signs such as insect excrement, holes in leaves or fruit and/or twisted or deformed leaves. Make notes indicating the number or extent of damage from week to week to aid in determining whether insects and/or damage is increasing.
Identify the Insect
Color photos of the most common insect pests and descriptions of others are included in this fact sheet. You should be able to develop a general classification of the pest based on this information. Once you have identified the pest, you should classify the type and amount of damage it is causing.
Controlling Pests
The best control is prevention. Pest problems can often be prevented by developing and maintaining a healthy crop through soil fertility, proper irrigation, choosing crops suited to the climate and soil, and by removing small infestations before they become a problem. Once you have identified a pest problem based on the type and amount of damage and made a decision to control the pest, you should consider the following. There are numerous methods of controlling pests; the most effective control often is achieved by combining control techniques.
Cultural Control
Vigorous, rapidly growing plants often ‘outgrow’ pest damage. You should plant recommended cultivars, maintain fertile soil with proper pH and moisture providing your garden a means to outgrow pest damage.
Sanitation - dispose of infested plant and trash materials that harbor pests and cultivate the soil to expose and destroy pests in the soil.
Weed control - keep the garden border areas mowed and trimmed and cultivate the garden to control unwanted plants (weeds) that serve as hosts to insects that can move over to your vegetable plants.
Time your plantings - many insect pests, including the corn earworm and squash bug, are less numerous early in the season and an early planting of vegetables will often ‘escape’ with little to no damage.
Traps are devices that collect or cause insects to con¬gregate, such as flat boards on top of the soil in the garden. Check the traps frequently and collect and destroy the insect pests in the traps.
Barriers serve to exclude pests from the crop and include the use of paper collars around the stem collar of young transplants that prevents cutworms from attacking and destroying plants. Other barriers include row covers made of transparent or translucent covers of woven plastic that allow light to enter, but block insects. Typically, these row covers are supported above the plants with hoop frames although light weight woven covers can rest on the canopy.
Mechanical removal by hand picking or washing with a directed stream of water is effective for large insects or eggs and for small, soft-bodied insects or mites.
Biological Control
Many insects and other arthropods feed on and destroy insects that are pests in gardens. Examples include the lady beetle and spiders that feed on insect eggs, larvae, aphids and mites. These BENEFICIAL arthropods are best used by preserving or augmenting their numbers. You can maintain a diverse and healthy garden by NOT spraying the garden unnecessarily with insecticides and by maintaining a diverse planting that provides alternate sources of prey, nectar and pollen. Beneficial insects can be purchased from suppliers and released in mass numbers but this practice has not proven reliable with the exception of release and management in greenhouses. (Refer to EPP-7307 Beneficial Insects). Many insects are attacked by pathogens that cause diseases that kill the insect pests. Most disease outbreaks occur during periods of wet and humid weather.
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insect pest control
