Every year during the gardening season
there's always many questions that
homeowners and gardeners have regarding
what material should they use to
best control insects,
weeds, diseases in their garden.
And these are all lumped together under
the term 'pesticide'. So there are a lot of
'cides' in the world to choose from.
If you're, say, going to control weeds in
your garden or in your flower bed we're
all familiar with the product, probably,
called "Preen".  This is an herbicide. It
controls plants.
If you're after diseases in your garden,
if you've got something like early
blight or late blight on tomatoes, pepper
spot on your pepper plants, you would use
an appropriate fungicide. If
you were looking at insects in your
vegetable garden,
there are
insecticides. And they work in different
ways, their mode of action. One needs to
be ingested. A very common garden
insecticide that were familiar with is
called "Sevin" or carbaryl.
This works because the insect ingests it.
So this would be a good insecticide to use
if you had chewing insects.
If you had other insects that weren't
necessarily chewing insects, say it was
aphids or
thrips, then
a contact material, a material that
you would spray while the insect is
present or the insect would walk through
very quickly after its application,
something like malathion, another
long known
insecticide. If
you were a
grower of apple trees or fruit
trees,
we know we hear about this phrase about
putting on a dormant oil spray. Well this
would be an example of a dormant oil
spray. The dormant oil sprays work
because
they literally smother the insect or
the insect egg as it overwinters on
your tree or shrub.
In a sense this is still an insecticide, but
there's really no chemical properties to it,
this is just a highly refined oil.
So all these 'cides' help us manage our
garden pest. Whether it's insects, whether
it's a disease,
whether it's weed control that
were after.
So when you're shopping around make sure
that you just don't go buying something
that isn't going to control the problem.
Read the label thoroughly. Make sure the
crop that you're spraying on is listed on
the label,
and that the product itself is not going
to harm the plants you want to use it on.
