To stay in business, most commercial flower and foliage plant growers must become fairly sophisticated in using various types of pest management practices, insecticide formulations, application equipment, and in rotating insecticides from one chemical group to another. Commercial growers use a battery of general and restricted-use pesticides. Although amateur gardeners battle the same pests, the most effective chemicals for control are often very expensive or are restricted so that homeowners are not allowed to use them. This puts a moral burden on the commercial grower to try earnestly to eliminate all plant pests from bedding, potted, and cut plants before selling them. These keys, plus the color plates and the illustrations in the insect notes, will help you to identify the pests of herbaceous ornamental plants.
Identification is important to assure proper control measures.
This manual is designed to augment state Cooperative Extension Service publications on pest management, not to duplicate them. In no way are the suggestions for safe use and calibrations for proper application in the state Cooperative Extension Service recommendations to be belittled or ignored. This section on management should be viewed as an expansion of explanations begun in those publications. Total reliance on pesticides for pest management is labor intensive and sometimes very hard on the plants. Although there are numerous practical and philosophical problems with the chemical control of insect and mite pests in the greenhouse, pesticides will remain important in greenhouse pest management at least for the next few years.