Are Your Gardening Habits Sabotaging Your Pest Prevention Strategy?
It’s difficult not to feel relaxed in a beautiful garden, particularly during the spring when all the brightest flowers are beginning to bloom. This is when you’ll start to see birds popping in for a visit, particularly if you leave tasty morsels around, and butterflies and bees arriving to feed and pollinate the plants. The only problem is that you can’t really pick and choose who takes a fancy to your flower beds.
There are all kinds of bugs and creepy crawlies that either pose a threat to the health of a garden or are keen to find their way inside your home and cause a nuisance. At Dawson’s Pest, we have all kinds of effective solutions for dealing with this problem, but you can play your part by getting smart with your gardening habits.
We have put together this handy guide to pest prevention so that you can avoid the risky gardening habits that might lead to problems.
While most of us are aware of the dangers associated with leaving loose bin bags in the garden – the smell of food attracts mice, rats, and foxes – we tend to not to worry about things like sugary drinks, sweets, biscuits, and ice lollies, particularly in the summer. Yet, leaving sugary items in the garden for long periods is an invitation for bees and wasps to gather. Bee removal is a tricky job and should only be handled by the experts, so it is important that you take simple steps to prevent nest building.
It is a common misconception to assume that dousing the whole garden in strong pesticides is a great way to make sure that pests never come back. We can tell you that it isn’t as clever an idea as you might think, for one important reason – not all bugs are pests. This method leads gardeners into a never-ending cycle of spraying because it also kills off the insects that naturally feed on the nuisance bugs. If you stick to healthy gardening habits and trust the predators to do their job, you’ll find that your plants and vegetables actually fare very well.
Lots of Australian homes have wood burning fires or fire pits in the garden, which can lead to an easy mistake. If you collect your own wood, don’t just leave it on the ground, exposed and unprotected. It creates the ideal environment for termites and they don’t just stop at timber either. Given enough time, they’ll seek out wooden components in and around the house and start eating away at them. So, store your wood in a lidded container or in a sturdy, weatherproof shed. If you suspect that you already have termites, it is imperative that you call our removal experts right away.
Things like termites and woodlice absolutely love dark, moist places, so a leaking pipe on the wall of a house is like Christmas to them. They like to breed and hang out close to the foundations of a house and moisture in this area makes them very happy. You can prevent your foundations from looking like a tasty treat by attending to leaky taps, pipes, and hoses as soon as you spot the problem. Also, avoid planting too close to the foundations, as this makes it hard to keep an eye on their health. Check out our guide to termite baiting and monitoring for some advice on effective methods of control.
The thing to remember about pest invasions is that they can start very simply. However, if they’re not dealt with in the right way, they can progress quickly and become a big problem. So, it is a much better idea to adopt healthy habits than it is to try and tackle pests retroactively. If you think that there is a pest problem building in your home or garden, get in touch with the Dawson’s Pest team and we can stop it in its tracks.