Pest Management in Your Backyard:
3 easy ways to manage pests without pesticides
Hands down, the homeowner is the most important piece of the plant health puzzle in Grande Prairie. Luckily, keeping your trees pest-free is often simpler than you think.
Step 1: Monitoring
This is the most important step of all. Get out there and look at your trees!
Make sure you know what species of tree you’re looking at, since each one has its own problem insects and diseases. There’s no use looking for mountain pine beetle on your larch!
To help identify your trees and their common problems, check out the Tree section of the Parks department webpages on www.cityofgp.com/parks.
Look for anything out of the ordinary on your trees – bite marks or discoloration on the leaves, sawdust or bore holes in branches, wounds or sunken areas on the trunk.
Step 2: Identification
So you’ve found something odd on your tree. Maybe the leaves are curling and turning yellow, or there’s a tumor-like growth on one of the branches. Whatever the symptom, your job is to correctly identify what you’re looking at before attempting to treat it.
Don’t just hack the branch off or spray the tree with whatever you have lurking in your garden shed.
Every pest has its own specific treatment and you can’t know what to do until you know what you’re dealing with. Plug in the symptoms into Google and look at some pictures, or check out the Pest Management section of the Parks department webpages.
If you’re truly stumped, you can give Parks a call at (780) 830-5018 and get some help or recommendations.
Step 3: Control
Once you have identified what problem you’re looking at, next you’ll want to take care of it in the most efficient way possible. Luckily, this doesn’t have to mean using chemicals!
In fact, the City of Grande Prairie follows an Integrated Pest Management program that encourages staff and citizens to use alternate control measures before turning to pesticides.
These tactics are outlined below.
What are your chemical-free pest control options?
Physical removal (picking and squishing)
For many leaf-feeding insects, physical removal (picking and squishing) is by far the easiest and most effective control method. It requires no special equipment, it’s free and it’s environmentally friendly!
Pests that this method works well on include:
| Pear slug sawfly on hawthorn or cotoneaster |
Yellow-headed spruce sawfly on spruce |
Forest tent caterpillar on cherry or aspen |
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Prune out and destroy the infested or diseased part of the tree
For boring insects and some diseases, you may have to prune out and destroy the infested part of the tree before the problem can spread. Make sure you destroy the infected branches immediately after pruning; don’t keep them around to re-infest your trees.
Pests that this method works well on include:
| Black knot disease of cherry and plum |
Bronze leaf disease of Swedish columnar aspen |
Western gall rust of pine |
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| Western ash bark beetle of ash |
Bronze birch borer of birch |
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For tiny insects, spray the tree with a forceful jet of water
Sometimes the biggest problems are caused by the smallest insects. Aphids, scale insects and spider mites are often overlooked because they are so small to the naked eye, but they can cause a lot of damage by sucking out plant juices and deforming or killing leaves.
Try spraying your trees down with a forceful jet of water every 7-10 days to knock off the insects and drown them.
This can have mixed results, as these pests have extremely fast reproductive cycles and can repopulate a tree very quickly.
Pests that this method can work on include:
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Spruce spider mites
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Aphids
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For more information
The Parks Operations website has a ton of useful information for homeowners on getting the most out of your trees. Take a look on www.cityofgp.com/parks today!
