Integrated Pest Management

Bugs are a reality of this world. Christmas Trees receive much less pesticide treatment than the vegetables and food that we eat. But in order to deliver the perfect tree we must fight the bugs that seek to destroy them. Typically the first four years we use no pesticides and rely on predators and insect scouting for hot spots. After this we spray the tree once a year with a 1% solution of pesticide that is active for about 10 days and is then gone. There are definitely no pesticides on the tree when it is shipped.

The goal of INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT is to decrease dramatically pesticide and herbicide treatment. Instead of spraying at the first sign of insects we tolerate in our non go to market trees a level of insects that will no or minimal damage trees and may be taken care of by predator insects. We are continually scouting the trees for insects with our hand lenses and when the predators do not do the job we then treat the field for insects.

We do the same thing for weeds. We spray suppression rates (non killing) of roundup (EPA states that it is less toxic than table salt) and also plant clover in order to control weeds which can hurt the trees look. We are very successful using this technique. In the past it has been very expensive to achieve weed control through this method we have decreased costs significantly.