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Keeping Troublesome Bugs Away from Your Lawn and Garden

Keeping Troublesome Bugs Away from Your Lawn and GardenYou spend hours each week fine-tuning your flower garden and making your yard look like a masterpiece. All of your hard work can easily be gone in a matter of days thanks to a specific species of bug or pest. Holes, deteriorating plants, and missing leaves are just some of the signs of a possible pest invasion in your flower garden. In some cases, all you need is a simple treatment, but if you let the problem go on for too long, you could lose your plant. If you suspect a problem with a plant-destroying insect, tackle the issue head-on.

Garden Slugs

Have you been noticing that your hostas are not looking as vibrant and polished as they typically have looked seasons prior? If so, there could be something destroying the leaves or harming the plant. One such pest is a garden slug. They are typically yellowish orange in color and make themselves seen after a good rain or watering. They typically avoid the sunlight, so they retreat to a cooler more moist environment. Garden slugs adore the leaves of a hosta plant. One day you may notice a few holes in your hostas, but then a few days later they are devoured with lace-like holes. Because slugs love to feed at night or early in the morning, a slug infestation may be hard to detect during the day. Go out at night with your flashlight and hunt them down. A good remedy is to lay a burlap sack down near the plants. Most will retreat to it and in the morning you can collect them and move them elsewhere or dispose of them. For a heavy duty infestation, you may want to consult with an exterminator in Denver or a local pest control company.

Japanese Beetles

Is one of your most prized plants your rose bush? Roses are a treasured perennial that comes in a variety of colors and species. Great care and concern revolves around raising any type of rose, so when you notice that your plant isn’t doing too well or there are holes all over the leaves, it’s time to attack the source. One bothersome pest of the beloved rose is the Japanese beetle. They lay their eggs in the grass and reproduce quickly. They feed off of many cultivars, including the butterfly bush and purple coneflower, in addition to most roses. If you spot them, it’s best to flick them off into a soapy solution to drown them out. They don’t harm humans but they can destroy your plant at a record pace.  Most Japanese beetles can be controlled with consistent removal of the pest, but if they are overtaking all of your plants you might want to think about calling in a pest specialist to see if they can get the problem under control by spraying your plants down with a chemical treatment.

Earwigs

Earwigs are one of the garden pests that are more undesirable to look at. They are small brown insects that appear to have a pair of clampers on the end of their bodies, for large infestations, you may find they don’t hesitate to crawl on you when you’re outdoors. They love to crawl just about anywhere and are more of an eyesore than anything else. Earwigs are beneficial to the garden because they eat away at the decaying matter that plants leave behind. They can multiply rapidly and if a plant is weak it may eat away at too much matter and destroy the plant. Once you clean up the dead plant material around your plant and prune it back regularly, you most likely will deter most earwigs from re-homing to your garden area.

Grasshoppers

The grasshopper is often an insect of wonderment. Many children love to observe grasshoppers and watch how they thrive in their environment. A few grasshoppers aren’t anything to be too overly concerned about, but when you have swarms of them, you can begin to see how negatively they affect your garden. Not only can they swarm you, they can eat up to half of their body weight daily and self-destruct on most vegetation, including annual and perennial plants. One way to thwart grasshoppers is to invite more bluebirds to your yard. Bluebirds love grasshoppers as their main course meal and grasshoppers tend to stay clear of areas where bluebirds migrate to. For severe issues, a pest control pro may be your only option.

If you feel like you can tackle garden pest issues on your own that is great, but if things are out of control, a pest specialist will be able to help assist you.

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