Considering it’s February, I’m guessing many of you have already forgotten your New Year’s resolutions. Whether you vowed to hit the gym, learn to cook like Gordon Ramsey or finally clean your rain gutters, let’s make a few easy pest prevention resolutions that won’t break your back or your budget.

Search the perimeter of your house.  What are you looking for? Anything out of the ordinary, but pay specific attention to the things listed below. If you have kids, invite them to join you. Tell them you are going on a scavenger hunt and ask them to help you find:

• Holes. Are there any potential rodent entry points? Rats can enter a structure through a ½ inch hole and mice can enter through a ¼ inch hole. They also are very good climbers and can gain access to a structure through pipes, along wires and from climbing trees or vines. Look for holes in the roof, around windows, doors and crawl space vents.
• Mud tubes. Mud tubes are the pathways subterranean termites use to travel from their nest in the soil to food sources (cellulose material, “aka” wood) in your house. They are constructed of soil and held together with termite saliva. Pay specific attention to areas of higher moisture, such as rain gutter downspouts and walls adjacent to bathrooms.
• Trees. Make sure trees adjacent to your house are not touching the structure. This creates an easy entry point for many pests, including rodents and ants.

Store firewood wisely. Even through it’s convenient to pile firewood alongside your house, it isn’t wise. You don’t want foraging termites to set up shop in your firewood and then move their operation next door to a more spacious site; your house. Move firewood away from the structure and stack it on top of concrete blocks. This limits the amount of soil-to-wood contact, and you can more easily see mud tubes, if they appear.

Harvest fruit trees. If you have fruit trees, especially citrus or pomegranates, harvest the fruit from the trees when ripe and try not to let it fall and sit on the ground. Fallen fruit attracts rodents and ants.

Check your buds. Search buds on flowering plants for aphids and scale insects. If you find them, treat them before the buds break to ensure the flowers and emerging leaves stay alive and healthy.

Following these resolutions will help you prevent common and potentially costly household pest infestations. What do you do if a pest still finds its way in? You can try tackling the problem yourself or contact a local pest control company. Lastly, visit UC Davis’s IPM online page for pest identification, biology and management information.

Robin L. Tabuchi is a research entomologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, she manages a research lab on finding ways to prevent and control many household and structural pests, including bed bugs, subterranean and drywood termites and argentine ants.

The practice of maintaining a healthy landscape offers many benefits to you as well. Plants serve as objects of beauty and enjoyment while also providing many environmental benefits such as food and shelter for wildlife. Well-maintained landscapes can even boost your home’s value. Taking care of plants also provides a sense of accomplishment and pride. Use these winter care tips below to show your landscape some love this Valentine’s Day.

1)      Take your lawn and flowers to dinner. All plants need nutrients to grow and be healthy. The most important plant foods are nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. They are found bundled appropriately for your lawn or plants in commercially-available fertilizers.  Be sure to read the label and apply the products at the right rate and time.

2)     Make a date to prune. Depending on what type of plants you grow, it’s important to prune at the correct time. For example, some experts recommend that roses be pruned in the late winter. However, certain shrubs and trees should be left alone until temperatures rise. Read more about the right time to prune from a previous Debug the Myths blog post here.

3)     Think warm thoughts. Winter is an excellent time to learn more about your growing zone and start planning for spring planting. Identify potential pest pressures associated with various plants and zones before you plant your seeds or nursery plants.

Andrea Vogt with Target Specialty Products and a Debug the Myths spokeswoman, recently appeared on Sacramento & Company to talk about things homeowners should be doing in and around their home this holiday season to protect themselves, their families, and their property from pests.

Pests are looking for warmth and food sources as soon as the temperature goes down. Homeowners should follow the INSPECT acronym to identify, solve, and prevent pest problems.

Andrea focused on certain pests that cause a lot of problems during the holiday season. Check to see if you’re having any of the problems below:

• Cockroaches – They can spread salmonella in our food and are an asthma irritant for kids.
• Rodents and silverfish – Hiding in your attic or crawl space with all of your Christmas decorations.
• Weeds – Fertilizing in the fall is the key to having healthy grass in the spring and decreasing weed pressures.

If you want to view Andrea’s full interview with Sacramento & Company, click here.

As part of the I.N.S.P.E.C.T. process, it is important to realize that this is a comprehensive method that works best when all the steps are accurately followed. Treating your pest problems without first investigating or studying will only allow for continued and reoccurring problems. So dedicate time and effort to applying each step for the most beneficial results in safeguarding your home from adverse health effects and costly structure damage these little critters can cause.

There are multiple pest management options available, many of which can be combined for the most effective results which is also known as Integrated Pest Management or IPM.  If you choose to apply a pesticide to rid your problems, make sure you have properly identified the pest and use only the appropriate pesticides and amounts for treatment. Reading and following the label on pesticides is not only the law, but also allows you to make sure it is suited for the problem you wish to treat and is not harmful to your family and home. Familiarizing yourself with the problems at hand and available treatment procedures will make sure you’ve found the best product for your situation. If you ever have questions or cannot make the application yourself, contact pest or lawn care professionals for support.

Learn more about purchasing a pest control product here, and watch Janet’s video for inside pointers on treating your home. Remember to INvestigate, Study and Prepare, Eliminate, Clean and Treat for taking strategic approaches in identifying, controlling and preventing against unwarranted invaders.

Thanks for learning how to inspect and protect your home this week. For any information you may have missed or for additional tips, you can always visit Debug the Myths to help you solve those unwanted pest problems.

Insects and other critters will happily make themselves at home wherever there is food and water. Here are a few easy housekeeping tasks from Molly Maid for maintaining your home.

For keeping a tidy kitchen:

• Clean daily around your refrigerator, stove, and dishwasher to remove any leftover food crumbs.
• Wipe down all kitchen counters after every meal. Leftover food particles might be enough to attract these little critters for an unintended feast.

• Before disposing of food containers and beverage cans, rinse them out.
• Store pantry food in air tight containers.
• Eat only in the kitchen and clean up after every meal. Limiting where you eat reduces the areas exposed to food residue, providing less risk for uninvited visitors.

In other areas inside your house, it is important to:

• Get rid of the clutter—stacks of papers, piles of clothing, and unneeded boxes. Pests love to hide and a cluttered home becomes a pest’s paradise.
• Pull beds away from the wall to lessen breeding grounds for bugs. Bugs like to nest in cool, dark spaces and exposing them will make these areas less desirable for local insects.
• Dust and wipe down baseboards regularly to avoid attraction to the mess.
• Properly clean all clothes before storing them in the back of your closet for winter.

When venturing outside, remember to:

• Trim trees, bushes and other foliage that might be providing a highway into your home.
• Remove any piles of leaves or debris that might be housing unwanted annoyances.

Following these suggestions may help you avoid the exterminator altogether. There is no need to give pests reasons to come searching for food and shelter in your home. You can watch Janet’s video here for more ways to keep your home clean and pest-free.

Don’t forget to send us any questions you may have and visit Debug the Myths to review any of the steps you have missed earlier in the week.

Pests like mice, spiders, and ants seek places that fill their basic survival needs of food, water, and shelter. These three conditions are what prompt these creepy crawlers to invade your home and establish it as their own place to live and breed. Often, you can cut off their life support by eliminating one of these three key elements.  Doing so requires physical action.

In the elimination step, you actually take action to reduce or prevent pest invasions by enacting a variety of preventative methods you considered appropriate for your home environment during the previous steps in the I.N.S.P.E.C.T. process.

To effectively pest-proof your home, you are going to have to start by fixing problem areas both inside and outside of your home. The key is to tackle any problems before they become too overwhelming. Employing a good preventative strategy beforehand will save you time and money in the long run.

• Eliminate water. Remove standing water outside from bird baths, lined gutters, wheelbarrows, and inside from sinks and showers. Fix any leaky pipes both inside and out that may provide a source of water these annoyances. A lack of water will make it harder for bugs to reproduce.

• Eliminate food. Keeping a clean kitchen can go a long way in making your home less attractive to pests. Sweeping for crumbs that may have fallen and keeping food tightly sealed in containers will make it harder for these bugs to find food.

• Eliminate shelter. This action is probably the best line of defense against pests entering your home environment. In the investigate step, we learned that pests can wiggle their way into your homes through openings as small as one quarter of an inch. A simple solution is to seal up these tiny cracks and crevices with caulk from your local hardware store.

Inside your home, caulking around all doors, windows and window seals where tiny bugs can easily penetrate can prove invaluable, especially in older homes that have settled and might have more points of entry for pests.  Check under sinks for the space around where the pipes enter and make sure to seal this area too.

Now take a walk along the exterior of your home—where most pests come from. It is extremely important to seal all windows and doors with gaps that could serve as access points. Chances are, if air and light can pass through, so can pests. So even if you think the crack may be too small, seal it anyway.

Trim trees and bushes near homes so they do not provide direct routes for pests into your home. A good rule of thumb is to leave 18 inches from the plant to the foundation. Consider mowing and weeding often to reduce creating a safe haven for pesky creatures.

Most preventative methods require a little extra time but using these solution suggestions and others found at www.debugthemyths.com will be a lot less expensive than hiring a professional exterminator. Be sure to also check out Janet Hurley’s video for more tricks on eliminating pest entry.

Now that you have investigated your home environment for pest infestations, the next step in the I.N.S.P.E.C.T process is to study these problems and prepare to take action against them.

You never know what that tiny pest crawling around your kitchen floor might be, especially since many pests appear different throughout the various stages in their life cycles. Common household pests are known to carry disease, which could be harmful to your family and pets.  Being able to accurately identify pests within your home is an important first step in treating the problem.

By studying, you will equip yourself with the knowledge needed to confidently recognize household pests, realize the possible damage they can cause to your health and home, and understand how to better prepare for implementing the proper control procedure.

You will want to find out which pests are prone to your region, what they look like, the damage the can cause, what attracts them to your home, how to control them and how to prevent future infestations. Gathering thorough and helpful information on these topics will help you prepare for successful treatment. It might take a little extra time and effort to gather useful information from various sources, but a good place to start is by visiting your local lawn and garden store, contacting your local extension office or researching information from trusted sources on the Internet.

Our website, www.debugthemyths.com, hosts an assortment of tools that can help you with studying and preparing for household pest problems. Here you will find information from our team of specialists, receive answers to commonly asked pest questions, submit images of pests for proper identification from our team of experts, learn about state and local policies, and discover much more.  The universities of Florida and Virginia Tech are great additional resources for review and management of common household pests.

Studying and preparing are fundamental elements in understanding how to implement suitable treatment options and eliminate pesky problems.

Visit Debug the Myths for more tips on identifying pests and watch extension specialist Janet Hurley’s video of the day for information on how to better study and prepare for  pest invasions.

Today kicks off National Inspect and Protect Week, a week designed to provide you with all the information you need to identify, control, and prevent pests from entering your home environment. Each day this week, we will introduce you to a new step in the process and teach you how to properly apply it. Today, we will start with step one—Investigate.

When investigating your home to make sure it is keeping pests out and not inviting them in, it is important to consider the many ways pests can access your living quarters.

Start off by investigating the perimeter of your home. Pests naturally migrate to water and standing water in bird baths, garbage bucks, gutter lines, and wheel barrows so they often serve as popular breeding grounds for insects like mosquitoes. It is important to remove all standing water from around the home.

Plants and shrubbery directly in contact with your home provide easy access and direct routes for ants and other small pests. It is smart to leave about 18 inches between the trellis and the exterior of your home to avoid these problems.

While inspecting, you may think your home is closed up tight, but it is important to realize that most pests, such as ants, spiders, and roaches only need crawlspace about one quarter of an inch to enter homes. The untrained eye often overlooks these entrances, but carefully searching for small holes in screens, window seals, and in the structure of your home might help you prevent invaders from wiggling their way inside.

Once inside your home, these pests will be on the hunt for food and water. It may seem simple, but keeping your kitchen clean and crumb-free is a good pest prevention technique. Sweeping and dusting routinely will prevent pests from being attracted to any crumbs that may have fallen. If there isn’t a source of food or water in your home, these creepy crawlers cannot survive.

Investigating your home is the most important thing you can do to protect it from unwanted pests and surprises. Using tools such as Housepests Uncovered and following a detailed checklist will teach you where to look for pests and save you time, money and a lot of hassle.

Be sure to tune in tomorrow for more great tips on inspecting your home, and check out extension specialist Janet Hurley’s video of the day for tips on how to INvestigate your home.

In the southwest, we warned homeowners how the oppressive heat and extreme drought during the past few months is causing increases in pest populations and provided tips on how to safeguard homes from pests on the prowl for water.

With a large deer population in the northeast, we educated residents about the risks of deer tick-borne illnesses such as Lyme disease and ways to protect themselves when venturing outdoors this fall.

In the southeast, where ants are running rampant, tips were provided to ensure residents don’t become vulnerable to these creepy crawlers infesting yards and homes.

Finally we headed west, targeting bed bugs that have waged war on densely-populated cities. We offered tips on properly eradicating these resilient pests and preventing future home invasions.

And now, the time has finally come. Tomorrow officially begins National Inspect and Protect Week.

Make sure to tune in every day this week for the tools and information you need, as homeowners, to prevent pests from making their way into your home environment this fall and winter seasons. This week’s goal is to take you through the simple, yet effective I.N.S.P.E.C.T. process. By INvestigating, Studying, Preparing, Eliminating, Cleaning and Treating, you can effectively identify pest problems as they arise, control and successfully treat the problems and prevent future harm to families and homes from pests.

To learn about these tips and more, visit Debut the Myth. Be sure to contact us with any questions about pest problems in your regions.

This past year, bed bugs have taken up residence in homes, hotels, and businesses across the United States. Los Angeles and other west-coast metropolitan areas are no exception.

While New York City remains the nation’s bed bug capital, cities along the west coast such as Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco are becoming breeding hotspots because of California’s alluring temperate climate, significant population in inner city areas, and dense residential communities. All places beg bugs love to live!

These resilient pests are excellent hitch hikers and easily ‘leap’ from one target to the next at hotels and/or public transit. These pests are often transferred from clothing to furniture, and once inside your home, these unwanted roommates begin venturing out to feed and multiply.

While they do not transmit disease, they leave evidence of their bites—large, itchy swellings on the skin similar to bites from mosquitoes, fleas, or spiders. In addition to welts, bed bugs may also leave bloodstains or droppings on linens where you sleep.

But don’t think you can easily spot bed bugs running rampant in your home. Bed bugs like to hide and because of their small size can do so just about anywhere—in clothing, furniture, electrical outlets, under wallpaper, mattresses, air conditioning vents, and in any crack or crevice.

As bed bugs become more pervasive, it’s almost impossible to know where they’ll show up next. Don’t let your home become their home too. Keep the pests at bay by staying vigilant and checking bedding, clothing, and material furniture.

Early detection is key. If you see signs of a problem, don’t waste time and money by trying to exterminate the bugs on your own. Hire a licensed and qualified pest professional to eradicate these pests. You can prevent infestations by:

• Monitoring daily for pests.
• Fully inspecting your suitcases prior to re-packing for a return home from traveling. Also, wash clothing and bedding at warm temperatures after returning from travel.
• Purchasing mattress and pillow encasements. These bed bug proof enclosures are extremely affordable and provide a tight seal around your box spring, mattress and pillows.
• Keeping children’s backpacks in plastic bags or closed storage bins. At minimum, do not leave backpacks in or near bedrooms.
• College students should inspect dormitory mattress seams, particularly at the corners, for telltale stains or spots before putting sheets on the bed. Students should also thoroughly inspect the entire room before unpacking, including behind the headboard and in sofas/chairs. If anything suspect is found, immediately contact a university facility manager.

Inspect and Protect Week is just a week away! Be sure to check back each day next week for more tips on keeping your home pest-free.