Pest Control for Indoor Gardens

When you practice indoor gardening, one of the issues that can diminish the fun is the number and ferocity of insect pests that can wreak havoc with your plants. There are, however, several indoor gardening supplies that can be used to control various pests from damaging your indoor crops, and will thus increase your plants' yields. Indoor gardening supplies can include such pest control products as powder sulfur and spider mite control, to name a few.

Powder sulfur

Powder sulfur is one of the indoor gardening supplies that will best control thrips. Thrips will puncture the cells of your plants and suck out the contents of the cells, resulting in cosmetic damage to crops. Sulfur can be used in a vaporizer unit, which sends out sulfur vapors into your indoor gardening area. Sulfur will change the pH level on the plant's leaves and stems, which will cause damage to pest reproduction cycles. Changing the pH level also has the added advantage of reducing the common plant disease of powdery mildew, which can be a problem in damp greenhouse settings.

Spider Mite Control

Indoor pest control can also include a program for reducing spider mites. Indoor gardening supplies used to control spider mites include beneficial insects.

This form of controlling spider mites can be used as an initial means of implementing integrated pest management, also called IPM. This is a method whereby you initialize your pest management by using the least toxic means of controlling the problem, and move up the chain to more powerful and toxic solutions only if necessary.

Beneficial insects are an organic gardening solution for controlling spider mites. Although they are very tiny insects, when amassed in large groups they can decimate a greenhouse crop very quickly. They, like thrips, suck the contents out of plant cells, leaving a scar on the leaves and stems of the plants. If a plant has too many of these scars, it suffers a reduction in photosynthetic ability, causing it to not be able to take in enough nutrients. This can eventually kill the plant.

There are beneficial insects that will kill spider mites. Although its name is not easy to pronounce, Phytoseiulus persimilis is nevertheless one of the indoor gardener's best friends when it comes to spider mite control.

When using a beneficial insect as a method of controlling another harmful insect, you will want to release the beneficials as soon as you detect a potential indoor pest control problem, because the sooner they get to work, the sooner they will eliminate the problematic greenhouse insect guest. These are one form of indoor gardening supplies that work best indoors, because they keep their feeding focused in one small area to get rid of the pests efficiently.

Indoor gardening supplies including pest control systems can be found to meet your specific indoor gardening needs, suitable for the particular types of plants you grow.

An expert in indoor gardening, Susan Slobac discusses a variety indoor gardening supplies that can be used for indoor pest control.