Living With Pests—Part 2: A Pest Education

Our culture offers us quick and facile answers to most of our problems. A physical discomfort is readily overcome by a miraculous medication—so the pharmaceutical industry would have us believe. The typical garden catalog or magazine is filled with ads for products that will rid your vegetable patch of any pest. They’d have you believe it’s assured and final. You don’t need to understand your garden opponent, just identify the critter and buy the antidote.

These quick fixes, however, come with a price: they’re expensive, as well as often toxic and temporary. In fact, the chemical “cure” can be worse than the disease. One can naively poison the soil, or upset the balance of nature (say, by also destroying good bugs), or pave the way for a future counterattack, as your nemesis returns in a more formidable form (some chemicals breed super bugs).

There is a nonviolent, more effective approach to dealing with pests, but it requires time and effort. It begins by reducing one’s ignorance of the adversary. As any martial artist knows, the first step to dealing with an opponent is to study him. The more you know about your antagonist, the more intelligent your response will be.

In reality, every critter that threatens the garden is Mother Nature’s work of art. That’s a good place to begin. It may not be a form of art that I appreciate, when I survey the damage, but that pest has exquisitely evolved to occupy its niche. It deserves to be respected and appreciated for what it is—not reviled as some worthless creature. It helps to begin by shifting one’s attitude and coming to see your opponent as a worthy one.

Once this appreciative mind-set begins to sink in, you can begin to conceive of more sane approaches. The critter I regard as a pest has possibly come to be one because I have upset nature’s balance. Rather than rush to kill it, there may be a way to restore the equilibrium. For example, every bug has its predator. Maybe I simply need to help the predator flourish. I may even have naively eliminated that predator by some previous rash action.

As I begin to understand my garden adversary (oh, the books I have purchased and the Internet searches I have launched!), much more effective responses are discovered. Some of the most effective actions have come to me as I read a minor tidbit about the pest—such as something that it abhors.

An example: Voles used to run through the tunnels that moles built under our garden. They would stop beneath a lush veggie and chew the roots off (later we’d watch the plant shrivel), and sometimes even draw the rest of the young plant into the tunnel below, dining on it at leisure. After months of frustration (and shamelessly attempting some fairly lethal but futile assaults), I read that voles are terrified of dogs and other such carnivores, and that they possess an excellent sense of smell. Aha! Taking that cue, I combed hair from our dog and stuffed bits into all the garden tunnels I could find. Within a couple of weeks all voles had vacated the veggie patch!

More on pest martial arts next time…