Living With Pests—Part 3: Pest Martial Arts

Last time I wrote about studying one’s pestilent adversary. The greatest benefit of doing this is that by learning its ways, the adversary may be disarmed, with no need for battle. That’s the wisdom of the martial artist: with knowledge and skill, the problem may be defused, before it erupts into violence.

How does this martial process play out with garden pests? In one way, it may simply mean learning to live with the pest, while preventing it from multiplying and taking over. Life on the homestead can be a lot more mellow if you allow a little damage, while insuring that things are kept in check. This can often be achieved by making one’s Eden a little less attractive to the nuisances. Let me give a couple of examples. I described in the previous post how dog hair in a vole’s tunnel creates a vole’s worst nightmare: dogs had somehow invaded the tunnels. Run!

Ants can be another formidable foe. Life may seem to be relatively pest free, until one day you find a couple of ants on the kitchen counter. Where there are two ants, there are two thousand. Once inside the house, it may be too late; some form of chemical warfare may be necessary. We have found that they can often be kept outside by sprinkling dried pennyroyal around the door or other possible entry points. Shortly after we moved here, we discovered pennyroyal growing wild. A little investigation informed us that it was an excellent ant repellent. And it is!

The complexities of raising a garden present many excellent opportunities to practice pest martial arts. The garden attracts a jillion kinds of invaders, like worms, insects, beetles, slugs, and leaf rot. My spouse has become a graduate student of ways to combat garden pests. The result is a five-pronged program: (1) use minimal organic insecticides, and only when necessary, (2) plant veggies at different times and places each year (keeping the bugs guessing where dinner is), (3) keep the garden reasonably clean (don’t encourage nesting places or allow egg masses to overwinter), (4) distribute things that bugs detest (e.g., eggshells for cutworms), and (5) go after them by hand. The last technique can be the most effective, but is the bloodiest. Once you learn the lifecycle of a given insect pest, you can severely limit their numbers by performing early morning patrols, when you find them slowly stumbling from sleep. It is then quite easy to quash them (or their eggs) between thumb and forefinger.

Another approach is to learn that there are numerous beneficial insects that will go after your pests. Lady beetles like aphids. The praying mantis eats many bugs. Tachinid flies and parasitic wasps will lay eggs on the caterpillars of certain nasty moths and butterflies. Various solitary hornets and wasps go after bugs. Spiders do a great job of insect predation. These lovely critters can get killed by insecticides, along with the nasty ones. The beneficials are attracted by certain plants—some of them native “weeds” that we once pulled out (but no longer!), some of them certain types of flowers, some by keeping a good mulch layer down. There’s so much to learn!

Living with pests is a balancing act. You never win the war—especially if you choose to make it a war. These pests have been around far longer than we humans and will likely be here after we’ve departed this planet. We like to believe that we are in charge, that we dominate, that we are the inheritors of the earth. That type of thinking is a recipe for failure. We can get along so much more compatibly if we listen and learn, if we let go some of our hubris and learn to live with the pests.