wellness tips

A guest tip on natural pest control – an important topic that never would have occurred to me to write about. I hope you like it.

Coexisting with nature is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t mean you have to allow critters to take over your home. Pest infestations can impact your family in a number of undesirable ways, creating an environment that’s unhealthy and, in many cases, downright intolerable. Fortunately, you don’t need to saturate your home with chemicals in order to keep pests at bay. By practicing natural pest control, you can encourage would-be intruders to live somewhere else while keeping your home, health, family, pets and the earth safe.

Negative Effects of Pest Infestations on Your Health

Stress: When you know your home is infested with rodents or insects, it’s hard to stop thinking about them. Your skin might crawl at the thought of bed bugs walking on you as you sleep, or you may start to feel phantom ants crawling across your arms. It’s normal to experience stress when your home is infested, and some homeowners still feel anxiety even after a pest control company has taken care of the problem. When you practice natural pest control, which focuses on prevention, you’ll find peace of mind in knowing you’re doing all you can to keep pests out.

Diseases: Rodents are notorious carriers of diseases such as the bubonic plague, Hanta virus, salmonellosis, tularemia, rat bite fever and leptospirosis. The scary thing is that a rodent doesn’t need to bite or touch you to pass on an illness. Simply being exposed to its droppings or nesting site can make you fall ill with, for example, the Hanta virus. Some of the diseases rodents carry present like the flu, making them initially difficult to properly diagnose until the illnesses are in their advanced stages.

Discomfort: What do mosquitoes, fleas and bed bugs have in common? Their bites make you feel itchy. While most insect bites are more annoying than harmful, scratching itchy spots can lead to a secondary infection.

Asthma triggers: Asthma is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in children and adults, and up to 60 percent of asthma sufferers are allergic to cockroaches. Merely touching a roach’s exoskeleton, which the bug can shed, can trigger an asthma attack. Using chemicals like toxic baits, fumigators or sprays to get rid of pests can trigger asthma symptoms and possibly make them worse than usual.

Toxic bites: Most spiders are harmless and meek, but there are a handful that can do major harm if they bite you. These include the recluse varieties, hobo, black widow, brown widow and red widow spiders.

Pest Prevention Tactics

The best way to practice natural pest control is by employing simple prevention techniques. These natural methods, when used regularly, can help you keep infestations at bay better than any toxic repellents. For example:

• Don’t leave food out in the open.
• Store pantry items in lidded glass or thick plastic containers.
• Eliminate sources of standing water in and around your home.
• Seal holes and cracks along the exterior of your home.
• Use lids on your trash cans.
• Keep your landscape mowed, pruned, weeded and manicured.
• Clean your house regularly and keep it tidy.
• Keep wood piles high, dry and away from your house.
• Inspect your luggage for signs of bed bugs after traveling.
• Inspect guest rooms for signs of bed bugs after you’ve had overnight visitors.
• Plant insect-repelling plants and flowers around the exterior of your home, including mint, pennyroyal, petunias, tansy, rosemary, geraniums, marigolds, citronella and wormwood.

Home Infestations: What to Do

Pest infestations can happen in even the cleanest homes. The trick is quickly taking care of the problem by calling a green pest control company that practices Integrated Pest Management (IPM). IPM involves using knowledge of pest biology (with a bit of common sense thrown in) control pests. For example, technicians will identify the pests, get rid of their nesting sites, make it harder for the pests to access your home and use other natural pest control techniques to give you a healthy, critter-free environment. Green pest control companies use natural techniques whenever possible – in large part because they’re more effective both immediately and in the long term – and will choose the least-toxic treatments available when an application is necessary.

If you have a pest infestation, or think you have one, call a natural pest control company to schedule an inspection and learn personalized tips for keeping your home pest-free.

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This post was contributed by Eden Advanced Pest Technologies, the leading integrated pest management company in Western Washington and Oregon and serves both residential and commercial customers.

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