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Houseplant pests are vicious. They are exhausting and once they take over one plant they tend to go all over the place in an entire collection. That is why The first tip to naturally preventing any kind It houseplant pests are going to be…
1. Quarantining Your New Plants
Take your new plants and make sure for 30 days that they’re separate from all of the other plants. If they have any pests on them you will see them before they cover your entire collection. You will be able to deal with them on just the one plant right away and not have to deal with an entire pest-infested area. Which definitely very exhausting.
2. Wiping off the leaves of your plants
If you are wiping down the leaves of your plants and you can clean all of the dust and debris off of it it is going to help to make a healthier plant. And a happy clean plant in a much less homey environment for all those nasty little pests that like to be there. Cleaning your plant leaves is super easy! All you have to do is take a cloth, and get some more water on it. You want it to be warm water. Then you simply go up and down and you wipe the leaves down(front and back of each leaf). This is going get all of that dust and is actually gonna make your plans a lot happier and healthier as well because they’ll be able to photosynthesize and soak up all that light a lot better which brings me to number 3
3. Happy Plants Happy Life
Make sure that your plants are getting what they need. An unhappy, unhealthy plant is going to send out signals that are literally calling pests to it. Similar to a hurt animal in the wild. I know that is a very horrible analogy but it’s very very true that is why your struggling plants tend to always get those pests all the time. It is because they’re literally calling out to the pests that they are a free buffet. So definitely want to make sure that your plants are getting what they need. Are they getting the right light? Are they being watered regularly or are they being cleaned regularly? Are they fertilized properly? Are they actually healthy plants? Even if they are healthy plants and they do get some pests they will usually be able to fight the pests off before the infestation is even bad enough for you to notice. Making sure that your plants are as happy and healthy as possible is a very very critical and crucial natural device for pest management.
4. Check Your Plants
If you don’t actually physically check your plants then you are not going to notice when they are struggling. You are not going to notice when the pests first pop up. To check your plants, You want to go ahead and check the stem, the underside is leaves, if you have a very compact plant then definitely go and check inside the interior as much as possible. Dig through the little tiny jungle you have in that pot to check and see what’s going on in there.
Pests like mealy bugs and thrips can really thrive in those tight little areas. Spider mites like to thrive at the little corners of the leaves there where the petiole will meet the stem. You definitely want to make sure that you’re checking all of those areas for pests regularly and that way you could take care of them as soon as they appear.
When you first notice a pest on your plant you want to remove it from the other plants as quickly as possible. You want to quarantine it and separate it from the other plants and you want to treat it as soon as possible.
For example: If you notice one mealybug on a plant; take that plant away. Put it somewhere else where it’s going to be happy. Clean it all off and make sure that it’s a nice happy clean plant. All its needs are being met.
You can treat it however you want to. You can use just a little alcohol in a cotton swab. You can just rinse it off with water or you can use some type of insecticide. You can get also get beneficial bugs that you release into that little quarantine plant hospital area or even through your entire collection.
There are many different ways that you can treat pests. Definitely make sure that you are treating them as soon as you notice them so that way you could have a happy healthy plant.
Also, note that just because one plant called out and got a pest does not mean that all the other plants are going to have pests as well. However, as I said in the previous step, make sure you are checking your plants on a regular basis. Just because there’s not a pest there today that you noticed; does not mean, that there will not be a pest there big enough for you to see tomorrow.
As long as you can make sure that all of your plants are as happy and healthy as possible generally pests are not that big a deal. They are not something to super stress over and just completing these simple activities on a regular basis can really prevent your entire collection from going down and being eaten up by pests
5 Natural Tips for Pest Management