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How to Grow Your Own Vegetable Garden
How to Grow Your Own Vegetable Garden

A step-by-step guide to growing vegetables

A Plant’s Basic Needs
A Plant’s Basic Needs

Every gardener must understand their plants' basic needs.

The Five Steps of IPM
The Five Steps of IPM

Integrated Pest Management will help you grow a healthy garden without harming the environment

Confused by Plant Descriptions?
Confused by Plant Descriptions?

There are so many different terms used by gardeners that it can be confusing. Find some common ones explained here.

Understanding Plant Fertilizer
Understanding Plant Fertilizer

Before you fertilize read this post!

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The Five Steps of IPM

The five steps of IPM cover photo

What is Integrated Pest Management? How does it work?

Integrated pest management sounds complex, but is simply a holistic approach to creating a healthy, fruitful garden without harming the environment. By following the five steps of IPM, you will begin to understand your yard’s ecological systems and take the least harmful approach to controlling pests.

Pests refer to insects, weeds, animals, and diseases.

Step One: Prevention

Prevention is the best cure.  If you can prevent the bugs, animals, or disease in the first place, you won’t have to resort to harsher methods. 

Healthy plants are the best defense. Plants that are stressed by drought, too much water, not enough fertilizer, or the wrong growing conditions, will be more susceptible to pests.  Refer to A Plant’s Basic Needs for an overview of how to grow a healthy plant.

Wind and Weather

This also fits with the first of the four types of controls, cultural, explained in detail on the next page. By cultivating a healthy environment you prevent many problems from ever starting.

Step Two: Inspection

Examine your plants.  This can be done when you are watering, weeding, or wandering around with a cup of coffee or glass of wine and admiring the new blooms or tidy beds. 

Plow & Hearth

Any signs of plant distress: changes to the leaves and growing habits, or signs of insect damage such as missing parts of the leaf, should be noted and dealt with as soon as possible. Sometimes the solution is as simple as grabbing the watering can or hose and giving them a drink.

Closeup of caterpillar and its damage on strawberry leaf.  Identification is one of the integrated pest management five steps
The five steps of IPM
Caterpillar and its damage to strawberry leaf. I squished the few I saw and sprayed my strawberry leaves with BTK, an organic pesticide specifically for controlling caterpillars.

When you see damage, take a closer look.  Flip your leaves over, check the soil around the plant, and look at surrounding plants.

Do you see any insects or eggs on the underside of the leaves?  Are the leaves curling, changing colour, marked with spots or holes, has the plant wilted or stopped growing? Are other plants affected? Take pictures so that you have a reference for researching the culprit and best treatment option.

Integrated pest management five step approach to controlling garden pests.  Spittle bug and its spittle on rose bud. 
The five steps of IPM
Spittle bug on rose bud. You can spray the plant with water or squish the bugs where you see them. You can see the bug at the bottom of the spittle it’s created as a camouflage.

Step Three: Identification

If a pest or disease symptom appears, you must identify it.  Treating the wrong insect or using the wrong control won’t solve your problem and could potentially make it worse.  Applying a product that kills off beneficial insects or harms the plant is counterproductive.

Use your photos to track down possible answers.  There is a free feature with Google photos called Google Lens and it will look up any picture and compare it to others on the Internet, sometimes returning your answer in moments.

Some insects only affect specific plants so make sure to include the plant’s name when you are searching the symptoms.

The five steps of IPM
Identify your weeds
Hemp nettle seedlings to pull

Step Four: Tolerance

Another component of IPM is determining your level of tolerance. How many bugs or how much disease is allowable?  Not all bad bugs are terrible.  They are part of the food chain and can be considered beneficial, in that sense. 

Not all disease will affect or kill the plant; perhaps it is only cosmetically unappealing.   Our intention for planting flowers and trees is to beautify the landscape, but perhaps some ‘ugly’ can be overlooked if the cure is worse than the disease.

Determine what your level of tolerance is for pests and disease.  If an outbreak occurs and your plants are suffering, then you must decide on how to control the pest.

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