Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a science-based decision-making process that combines tools and strategies to identify and manage pests. It’s not one specific action or tactic; it is the combination of all actions that reduce the impact of pests while minimizing negative effects on the environment. In addition to its primary purpose of reducing numbers of pests, it can help you maintain your garden as a balanced ecosystem, reduce or eliminate the use of harmful pesticides, and protect natural enemies in your garden.
Successful IPM programs include these major components – monitor, identify, assess, manage, evaluate. Here’s how to do it:
Monitor – Make regular observations about changes in your plants. Aphids are notorious for quietly building up a population on a single plant until the population maxes out the plant’s resources. Some insects and diseases progress so rapidly that the difference between a nonchemical solution and an insecticide application is just a few days.
Identify – Often the trickiest, and the most important aspect of IPM, is identifying the pest. Before you treat anything, you’ll want to be sure you know what you’re dealing with. Since only about 5% of identified insect species are pests, you don’t want to risk harming what may be a beneficial insect.
Assess – Usually, seeing a single pest doesn’t warrant treatment. You’ll first want to determine what level of damage you can tolerate. Give natural enemies a chance to balance pest populations before applying pesticides that affect both the pest and the natural enemy.
Manage – Use a combination of cultural, physical/mechanical, biological, and chemical management tools. Examples include:
- Cultural methods – selecting plants with known disease resistance, maintaining healthy and vigorous plants through proper soil health and cultivation, and good garden sanitation.
- Mechanical and physical methods – Manually hand-picking insects, washing pests off foliage with water or pruning them out.
- Biological methods – Encouraging the use of natural enemies to control pests and their damage including microbial based products that contain bacteria such as Bt – Bacillus thuringiensis.
- Chemical methods – Typically a last resort, using pesticides starting with the least toxic chemicals like horticultural oils, insecticidal soaps, and plant-derived products like neem seed extracts.
Evaluate – Check the effectiveness of your actions and make changes if needed.