Product Description

This resource gives homeowners hundreds of ways to control garden pests. Here are remedies for ridding lawns, gardens, and trees of destructive invaders.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #807771 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-01
• Released on: 1991-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 736 pages

From Amazon.com
If you have a home, an apartment, a garden, or a pet (or, in some cases, housemates or tenants), you've probably got pests. And if you want to control pests, there's no need to poison yourself. While the Green Revolution and DDT and other pesticides dominated the world of agribusiness, thoughtful scientists world-wide were simultanously and silently working on "Integrated Pest Management", which is often as effective as pesticides at reducing or eliminating pests. From ridding your apartment of cockroaches to dealing with the regional deforestation threats of Gypsy Moths, this is the authoritative book on how to control pests by using the natural mechanisms of control that have kept our planet from being savaged, prior to our human disruptions.

From Publishers Weekly
The authors of this impressive volume are founders of the Bio-Integral Resource Center in Berkeley, Calif., dedicated to nontoxic pest management. Throughout the book, their knowledge of environmentally friendly controls is richly evident. They begin by discussing basic plant, animal and insect names and information on management and natural pest controls--a section which, as they admit, readers may well want to skip, preferring to zero in on whatever particular pest they'd most like to stamp out. A thoroughgoing education follows: we learn nearly everything we'd ever want to know about pests and their control, ranging from indirect treatments to the physical (e.g., hand-removing Japanese beetles) and from the biological (releasing beneficial insects) to the chemical (insecticidal soap and baits). Pests of the home and greenhouse, the body, garden and the lawn are covered in unusual detail. (A section on pests in homes, for example, could serve as the basis for an annual homeowner's checkup.) The squeamish may not wallow in the lore of bugs so generously shared, but they'll marvel at the research that has fed the book--marvel enough, perhaps, to go back and read the introductory chapters.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Both this work and Bernice Lifton's Bug Busters: Poison-Free Controls for Your House & Garden ( LJ 3/15/91) promote pest prevention instead of crisis management and pesticide use. For the novice, Bug Busters is the more readable. It outlines basic facts and procedures without a great deal of detail, not even scientific names. More encyclopedic, Common Sense Pest Control is roughly three times longer, treats many more insect species in much more detail, sports more than four times the line drawings, and gives scientific names. Opening sections cover insect classification; the effects on pests of climate, weather, predators, pathogens, and parasites; basic concepts of integrated pest management; and chemical pest control agents (pesticides, organics, microbials, pheromones, growth regulators). Two appendixes list resources and suppliers.
-Annette Aiello, Smithsonian Tropical Research Inst., Panama
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.