March 12th is North Texas average last frost date, and that means insects will be returning to your landscape. That means the good bugs and the bad ones. To prevent insect damage this summer, get ahead of the pests with an organic solution. Healthy plants live in healthy soil. Like our stomach gut, the soil breaks down nutrients and keeps plants naturally healthy. Unhealthy soil is often the #1 cause of unhealthy plants, making them vulnerable to insect attack. Beneficial Nematodes are an organic way to protect your lawn, shrubs, and trees from insect pests, without harming the good insects (like this green lacewing that will eat aphids for you!).
Your Plants Have a Stomach Too
Treat Insect Pests Naturally
Chemical lawn care companies forget the #1 rule of all plant life: plants need healthy soil. Not just NPK nutrients. Plants need life in the soil. They need healthy microbes to break down nutrients and make them bioavailable to plant roots. Soil acts as the stomach for a plant, much like our own stomach which is home to tons of bacteria that makes the food we eat bioavailable to fuel our human health. Soil that is not fully alive is unable to help plants thrive, making your plants more vulnerable to attack by opportunistic insects. Protecting soil health is super important if you want to avoid insect pests.
An organic approach can stop the endless cycle of treating the symptoms, instead of the root of the problem. Organic is also the best approach to insect pests if you want to be careful and not harm the good insects (like butterflies, lacewings, and sphinx moths) that you want to come visit your landscape.
Gut Health
Your landscape may be suffering from insect pests because we forget that plants are a lot like us. Plants need a healthy level of microorganisms to keep their environment healthy and safe from pathogens. If your landscape suffers from insect pests, most likely your soil isn’t healthy. Bringing your soil back to life with an organic, ecofriendly approach will definitely help.
When we get sick, the doctor often prescribes an antibiotic. And thank goodness we have them. How many of us would have survived childhood without antibiotics! These wonder drugs help to save many lives every year. Unfortunately, they do kill off all the bacteria in our gut, which is why doctors often recommend eating fermented foods and drinks to replenish our gut microbiome.
Fermented foods have healthy, probiotic microbes and they taste great, including kvass (pictured above), sourdough bread, beer, kefir, kombucha, pickled vegetables, yoghurt, miso, kimchi, sauerkraut, and so many others. These are foods that have made human life possible for many, many hundreds of years.
Nematodes
Beneficial Nematodes are one of nature’s most valuable gifts. Farmers and gardeners all around the world for thousands of years have relied on these little, microscopic soil critters…..even before we know they were there helping us. Nematodes attack insect pests that live in the soil, to stop the pest before it becomes a problem. Thanks to nematodes, we are able to eat organic fruits and vegetables (which was the only type of food we ate until about 80 years ago). 99% of human history relied on the free services provided by nematodes to keep plants healthy so we could obtain the calories, vitamins, minerals, and nutrition our bodies need.
To fully understand how Beneficial Nematodes can protect your landscape from insect pests, let’s take a look at something we carry around with us every day: our own human skin. Our skin has a lot in common with soil. They’re both covered with good bacteria and fungi. Our gut also has tons of living critters, helping us digest food and release the nutrients that keep us alive. Both inside of us, and all across our skin outer surface, we are covered with millions of tiny little helpers, keeping us safe from disease and infection from pathogens. Without them, human life would be impossible.
Natural Waterproofing
Ever wonder why our skin gets oily? Thank goodness it does. It's our natural waterproofing. Skin gets oily because of tiny bacteria that live on us. Our forehead, nose, and back create an ecosystem for what is called "Cutibacterium.” These bacteria stimulate our skin to produce oils, protecting us from dry air and making our skin waterproof. The presence of this helpful skin microbiome protects us with a thin layer, like a shield, defending us from other bacteria that would be harmful and cause disease. In fact, if our skin loses too much of the good bacteria (washing improperly), that puts our skin at risk of disease (like eczema, acne, and psoriasis).
The same is true for the skin of the Earth: the soil. Excessive use of lawn chemicals (including herbicides and insecticides) kills off the beneficial life in the soil, exposing the plants that live in that soil to harmful pathogens. Your landscape it turns out is just like the human body. When everything is in balance, plants can thrive. Plants spread their leaves to capture plenty of sunlight and the soil is loose, not compacted, and able to absorb rainfall for your plants to produce the energy needed to grow.
Good Fungi
To access nutrients, just like our stomachs, plants enter into helpful relationships with beneficial fungi (called mycorrhizae). These tiny hair-like strands attach to plant roots to help bring water and nutrients from the soil. In exchange for this friendship with the fungi, the plant gives up part of the sugar it receives thanks to sunlight. It’s a win-win situation. Neither plant nor fungi could survive alone. Life is better (and only possible) together.
Unfortunately, using too many harsh chemicals on your lawn will damage this natural ecosystem, causing lots of (expensive) problems. The problems caused by these chemicals are not natural. These problem are unnatural. They are caused by human action. Problems like soil compaction, water runoff, shallow drought-stressed roots, poor nutrient uptake, deficiencies, and vulnerability to fungal and insect pressures…..these are unnatural problems. They keep you stuck with the “solutions” of chemical lawn care. And these solutions simply don’t work. They don’t fix the problem. They make it worse.
Soil = Stomach. Feed Your Gut.
Think about what happens when you take an antibiotic when you become ill. The antibiotic is powerful. It kills off your entire gut health. Including good bacteria. Keeping your gut healthy requires eating foods high in fiber (fruits and vegetables) to give the gut bacteria something to digest, keeping us healthy.
Older diets often work really well. Good bacteria was used to ferment food for hundreds of years. These foods kept our families strong and healthy long before canned food (since 1810, killing off all bacteria in food). Canned food today is highly processed, low fiber, and high in sugar, salt, and fat.
Old ways of eating still work great because, well, our bodies haven’t changed much in 200 years. The same is true of ecofriendly lawn care. What plants need hasn’t changed either. Organic works because an organic approach is built to deliver exactly what plants expect (and need) from nature.
Why Synthetic Chemicals Fail
Chemical companies need to sell their products, and this need requires your lawn (and millions like them) to suffer from insect pests. No pests. No sales. When you hire Soils Alive for ecofriendly lawn care, you support businesses that produce natural products that actually restore life and vitality to your landscape.
Nematodes are aggressive at controlling soil-born insects and are capable of naturally managing 50+ types of pests. They will attack and destroy soil-born pests, while being completely safe for pets and humans with no exposure risk for small pets and young children. Next time you need a fun fact to remind your friends (again!) that you are a nerd, remember this one: nematodes across Planet Earth weight 300 million tons, which is about 80% of the weight of the Earth’s entire human population.
For every one of us, there are 50+ billion of them. They even thrive in the harshest ecosystem of Antarctica. And they’ve been helping humans thrive, long before we knew their names. Thank goodness we have them on our side helping us! Soils Alive has been repairing and helping build healthier soil for beautiful lawns, shrubs, and trees across North Texas since 1997. If you’ve never tried an organic approach, now’s the time to put your trust in nature again to do what nature does best: help your plants thrive.