28 Feb 12 Explore year-round gardening
February 3, 2012
One of the province?s most highly regarded experts on West Coast gardening is coming to the Sunshine Coast next week.
Master gardener Linda Gilkeson, author and popular lecturer, will be a guest speaker at a special Gibsons Garden Club event on Tuesday, Feb. 7, at the Heritage Playhouse.
Gilkeson, who lives on Salt Spring Island, will explore the subject of year-round organic gardening, a subject in which she has a special expertise. Her most recent book, Backyard Bounty: the Complete Guide to Year-Round Organic Gardening in the Pacific Northwest, is a B.C. best seller.
As a private consultant, Gilkeson is a regular instructor in the master gardener programs in B.C. and is busy year-round giving workshops on pest management and organic gardening.
Tickets for her lecture, which begins at 7:30 p.m., can be reserved by calling 604-886-0960. Tickets are also available from AC Electronics in Lower Gibsons and from Quality Farms.
This February speaker fundraiser is a key annual event in the Gibsons Garden Club calendar. the annual speaker event is highly anticipated by the gardening community every year.
27 Feb 12 Mouse madness » Local News » NewburyportNews.com, Newburyport, MA
NEWBURYPORT — Dave Herbert of Essex Pest Control has seen his fair share of mice during his 32 years in the business. but nothing compares to this season.
The number of calls regarding mouse infestations began rising five years ago, he said. Then, after increasing by 20 percent each year, he suddenly logged a 40 percent spike in 2011.
“It’s definitely the worst we’ve seen so far,” said Herbert, who operates the business with his father, Dick Herbert. “We used to see more peaks and valleys. If someone called in the summer, it would be unusual. Now, we see it all the time.”
His observation was backed by Sheila Haddad of Bell Laboratories, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer of rodent-control products.
“From Virginia to Maine, it has become a big problem,” said Haddad, the company’s regional manager for New England and Canada.
Some residents who in the past may have seen an occasional mouse in the basement have had to ask for professional help this year, Herbert said. in December, he helped a family on High Street in Newburyport deal with an infestation that over the course of a few months had spun out of control.
The family had begun noticing the typical rice-size droppings in some kitchen drawers, a common mouse hot spot, Herbert said. As they pulled out the dishwasher, they discovered the insulation saturated with droppings. Ten mouse traps made no dent in the onslaught. when the homeowners watched a mouse sitting next to a trap, munching on a piece of cheese, Herbert received a call.
Another homeowner with an in-ground pool who would trap a mouse or two in the pipes every week was pulling out 30 mice every seven days this season.
“It gives you an idea about the increase in population,” said Herbert, who treated the home with bait stations, a plastic device with poison inside. the mice eat the poison and die in their nests within three to five days.
Herbert said people shouldn’t wait too long to take action after they see droppings.
“I’ve been to homes where people have just let it go,” he said, adding that evidence of mouse droppings also signals the presence of urine.
Herbert comes armed with unpleasant figures. If a pregnant mouse gets into a home, it can have a litter of five to seven pups every 30 days. Those pups, in turn, can reproduce in 45 days. in one night, a single mouse will leave, on average, 65 droppings, between 1,000 and 3,000 micro-droplets of urine and 100 hairs. It can jump 13 inches from the floor onto a flat surface and run vertically on a rough surface.
With the presence of mice comes the risk of exposure to a host of diseases such as meningitis and salmonella. Even after the droppings have been cleaned up, the salmonella virus may stay active in mouse urine for up to 90 days, Haddad said.
Deer mice, which are rare in urban settings, may transmit the hantavirus, a potentially deadly disease with symptoms that resemble influenza, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ticks also feed off mice all year, potentially bringing Lyme disease into homes in the winter, Herbert said.
No one can quite explain the proliferation of mice over the past few years, Herbert said. Haddad cited the unseasonably mild winter as a potential explanation for this season’s sudden rise, a possible decline in predators or a reluctance to deal with the problem before it gets out of hand.
“People pay thousands of dollars to get rid of bedbugs but don’t want to pay any money to get rid of mice,” Haddad said.
Taking a few precautions may keep the unwelcome visitors at bay. in the High Street home, Herbert found a couple of holes in the basement walls that gave the mice easy access. A mouse only needs a space the size of a nickel to squeeze through, he said. they may also enter via water spigots, gas meters or utility cables.
As common as mice may be, especially in antique homes, there is still stigma associated with having a mouse problem, Herbert said. although they do not discriminate between clean and less immaculate homes, he said they are more likely to thrive in a messy environment, which offers more places to nest and an ample supply of food.
Simple measures such as storing grains in steel containers, keeping bird feeders away from the house and using garbage cans with tight-fitting lids can make a difference, he said.
For more information on rodent-proofing, the Newburyport Health Department offers guidance and an educational brochure, according to Public Health director Robert Bracey.
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19 Feb 12 Biological Pest Control – Is it the Answer to Pest Control-Related Environmental Concerns?
Before we can get into trying to understand whether biological pest control is the answer to the pest-control related environmental concerns, it would be proper to give ourselves a little background information on this whole pest control business; for the benefit of those who may be encountering it for the very first time.
Now, pests are organisms (typically insects) that are injurious to the interests of the people who refer to them as such. thus to farmers, the insects that invade and eat up their crops (whether in the fields or during storage), would be termed as pests. on the other hand, the ‘domestic insects’ that tend to mess up with things in domestic settings (like moths, that can mess up with cloths in storage), are seen as pests by housekeepers. Worth keeping in mind is that although most pests are insects, there are also quite are number that are non-insects: with the likes of rodents (that can mess up with crops in farms of things stored in domestic settings) being seen as pests too, the fact that they are not insects notwithstanding.
Having seen that pests are injurious, it would be natural that the people who happen to ‘fall victim’ to them would want to get rid of them. In the meantime, people who haven’t yet fallen victim to pests would be keen to avoid such a ‘fate.’ Hosting pests, by the way, can be a serious fate: thousands of hectares of farmland have been known to be wasted by pests in a single day, leading to losses that often run into millions of dollars. it is the steps taken to avoid pest invasion then, or to resolve pest invasion if it has already taken place, that are referred to as constituting pest control.
Now pest control takes various forms, depending on the pests one is trying to get rid of (or to prevent the invasion of). and while bigger pests like rodents may be controlled through mechanical means like trapping, for a long period of time, it is chemical control that has worked for the vast majority of pests, which tend to be insects as previous mentioned. The chemicals used in this endeavor are what are termed as pesticides. and while pesticides are usually very effective in pest-control, the downside to them tends to come up when we consider the fact that they tend to be extremely environmentally unfriendly. Worth keeping in mind, at this point, is the fact that the chemicals referred to as pesticides tend to be very potent ones. so it often happens that traces of them remain where they were used, even after the pests are gone. Those traces are eventually washed down to the water bodies where they wreck great havoc to the (non pest) plants and animals resident in the water bodies.
It is concern about this environmental impact of chemical pest-control that led to questions as to whether a more environmentally friend method for controlling pests couldn’t be developed. The end result was the exploration of alternatives like the biological pest control, which we are trying to see whether it is really the answer to concerns raised about (chemical- based) pest control.
In biological pest-control, it is other organisms that are known to be predators to the ones viewed as pest that are unleashed upon the said pests; eating them up and therefore resolving the pest problem. thus if the troublesome pests are aphids, the other organisms that are known to feed on aphids are introduced into the field where the problem is, to feed on the aphids, rather than spraying an environmentally unfriendly chemical.
The problem with biological pest-control, though, is that it tends to be of questionable efficiency. While chemical pest control tends to be thorough, leaving no pests or even traces of them, in biological pest control, that can’t quite be assured. Implementing biological pest control on a large scale basis (for instance on a thousand hectare plantation) can also prove to be a herculean task. Ultimately, it is considerations like these that make us keep on thinking of more environmentally friendly pest control approaches. This is because biological pest control, while definitely being an approach that addresses the environmental concerns raised about chemical pest control, it doesn’t seem to be efficient (or scalable) enough, in most people people’s view.
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