In the early
decades of "modern chemistry" when synthetic
pesticides first came onto the market,
people were more likely to take a "nuclear
bomb" approach to pest problems. They would
just buy a container of something, spray it
on all of their plants and kill everything
in sight. Fortunately, most gardeners have
moved past this type of thinking and prefer
to be much more selective with their
pesticide use.
Once you have
positively identified the "problem" the next
step is to think about how much of this
damage you are willing to "live with". This
is called establishing thresholds.
In some
situations, such as tar spot disease on
maples appear late in the growing season and
really do no harm to the plant. It is simply
an aesthetic problem that bothers the
gardener more than the plant. The leaves
will soon drop from the trees and will be
replaced the next spring with new ones. What
do you do?
Well, that
depends on the threshold that you either
consciously or unconsciously set for YOUR
landscape. You can just accept the damage
and start thinking about the football season
or, in future years since the required
fungicide must be applied much earlier in
the summer, you can choose to spend the
money and effort to control the problem.
Suppose you
have a certain beetle chewing on the leaves
on some of the plants in your landscape. Do
you want to eliminate every last bit of
damage, accept a little damage or just
ignore it and let your plants look a bit
ragged by late summer. Again, the decision
us up to YOU as to if, when and how much
action you take for any particular problem
in the landscape.
Once you feel
satisfied with your threshold level, you can
move on to consider
Control Alternatives.
