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How to identify lawn pests

Maintaining a healthy and attractive lawn presents many challenges to Pennsylvania homeowners, especially when it comes to identifying and eliminating common lawn pests. Each type of pest creates its own set of problems. It’s usually not difficult to spot the problems that lawn pests create, but it takes a bit of detective work to connect damage to your lawn to a certain type of pest.

Complete a Visual Scan of Your Lawn

The first step in identifying if your lawn has pests is to do a quick scan of the entire area. If you spot random dead patches, it could be a disease or insect problem, but it may also be a dog urine or fertilizer issue. When the larger areas of your lawn look unhealthy, it’s likely affected by disease or insects such as grubs.

These and other types of lawn pests typically show up after the first thaw of winter and continue to become more prevalent in the early spring and into the summer. Whether or not you can identify the problem or not, we encourage you to contact Vir Terra Landscaping to arrange for immediate control measures.

Three Common Types of Lawn Pests

Your lawn could play host to hundreds of different types of pests. Three of the most common include:

  • Moles: If you have moles in your yard, you will notice raised ridges across the grass that serve as feeding tunnels. Moles burrow through grass searching for insects, grubs, and worms. Castor oil is an effective way to discourage moles as is setting a trap.
  • Voles: The damage from voles is most obvious when snow melts and you can see the cracks they created from burrowing under frozen ground all winter. They typically retreat to long grass and bushes to hide from predators when they can’t disguise themselves under snow. You can treat the damage by filling in the cracks with potting soil and compost. It’s also possible to repel these critters with castor oil before the snow arrives.
  • Chinches: The bugs attack in sunny areas of your grass by injecting toxins into the soil that loosens grass and by sucking juice from individual grass blades. Dethatching your lawn is one possibility for eliminating these tiny bugs. Applying insecticide also works well.

 

We’re Available to Help You with Lawn Pests

If you’re uncertain that you’re dealing with a lawn pest, it’s best to hire a professional landscape company to make the diagnosis. The crew at Vir Terra Landscaping has the experience and tools necessary to figure out the types of pests doing the most damage. Once we do that, we will make a recommendation for future services such as lawn fertilization or weed control. Don’t let pests ruin your lawn this spring when Vir Terra is here to help.