Bugs are not usually welcome visitors–especially when maintaining an office landscape or garden. Instead of waiting in fear, figure out how to prevent pests in plants before they make their irritating appearance. When you know the right steps to take from the start, your office plants are more likely to grow healthy, strong, and without pesky bugs.
How to Prevent Pests in Plants
Working with infected plants in your garden can be stressful and finding out how to prevent pests in plants can help lessen that stress.
Maintain Cleanliness
Keeping garden containers and planters clean is critical when preventing pests in plants. If your office landscaping reuses the same planters every year, soak them in a mixture of bleach and water for an hour or more. You will want to use nine parts water with one part bleach to create a sanitizing solution that will help prevent plant pests. Fully rinse the solution off the planters and let them air-dry before filling them with soil, seedlings, and plants. Any bleach or soap suds can either attract unwanted insects or hurt the plants you put into the container. Make sure to keep an eye out for any mold or fungi that may have grown on the planters during the colder seasons–they can easily contaminate flowers or veggie plants.
Choose Carefully
It may sound silly, but choosing the correct plants for your landscape or garden makes a difference. There are many plant and vegetable varieties more prone to pests than others. When it comes to vegetable gardens, choosing plants that are disease-resistant can be beneficial. An office garden should be a relaxing activity, not one filled with insects employees need to eliminate on their lunch break.
Another important choice for preventing plant pests is ensuring the plants you purchase are healthy. Though this may seem like another silly piece of advice, plants are often sold with pests already present or wilting leaves. Check the plant leaves and roots before making a purchase to see if there are signs of insects or disease. If the leaves are even the slightest bit brown or wilting, you may not want to take that plant. Root-bound stress is also a sign that pests may be settling into a plant.
Use Plant Covers
Utilizing covers or barriers helps prevent plant pests from entering your commercial office garden or landscaping space. Using a floating row barrier or cover helps save plants that are more likely to get attacked by pests. These covers are fabric-spun and easily sit atop wire hoops. To prevent sneaky bugs from getting in, you may want to pin down the edges of these barriers. If some of your landscaping plants are flowers, you will want to remove the cover so they can be pollinated by useful insects. Though there are many insects that cause disease and rot to your plants, there are still many helpful bugs!
