Originally published July 17 2005
Gardeners should exercise caution when working with pesticides
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The Charlotte Observer has a few tips from their gardening writer on how to work with pesticides and herbicides safely.
Here are a few of my common-sense ideas on sane and reasonable pesticide use.
Well, they were using the diesel fuel to kill weeds, and weeds are pests, so that made it a pesticide.
By definition, all herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and other "-cides" designed to kill pests are pesticides.
Recently, I was in a garden center, and a guy asked me which pesticide he should use for holes in his seedling green beans.
The trouble with spraying just to be spraying is that you kill a lot of beneficial insects.
The nursery had an occasional insect problem and decided to start a routine spray over the entire nursery every month during summer, using the most potent chemical available.Over the next five years, they experienced an outbreak of every insect known to the nursery trade and a couple of new ones.
Since spiders eat insects, killing spiders should increase insects, at least until more spiders hatch out.
If there are other insects around to kill these queens, mounds do not develop.
But if the other insects have died from indiscriminate pesticide use, they are not around to kill fire ant queens.
Good pesticide use, however, involves more than using only registered pesticides and only when you have a specific problem.
The measure of effectiveness, however, is not how fast the leaves die but whether a weed sprouts back from the roots.
I have never used the mixture, but I have used two of the chemicals individually.
Several of these were withdrawn from the homeowner market, including Diazinon and Dursban.
One of the major replacements is a class of chemicals called pyrethroids.
Gardeners I know who use this have been fairly pleased with its results.
In summary, anything that kills a pest is a pesticide.
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