Category Archives: Lawns & Grass

Letter from Toronto: Pesticide Bylaw Not Quite a Ban

April 15, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

I’ve been talking (and writing) about the pesticide “bans” (without quotation marks) in Toronto and other Canadian cities for months now, and just discovered that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

When I decided to visit Toronto to see my parents, I figured it would be great chance to learn more about the impact of the pesticide “ban” passed several years ago. Were people complying? Were there a lot of complaints? How did the parks look? How had the parks department adapted? Was the “ban” successful?

So I called a series of environmental organizations and city parks employees, explaining to each that I wanted to learn more about how things were going since the pesticide “ban.” The third or fourth one interrupted me: It’s not a ban, he said, which brought me to a screeching, stuttering, embarrassed halt.

When I re-read the by-law more carefully after that conversation, I saw the exception I’d missed: that pesticides are permitted “To control or destroy pests which have caused infestation to property.” Herbicides are banned outright, but insecticides are severely limited, not banned.

The city employs an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach, meaning that everything is done to encourage healthy plants (including grass) and that pesticides are not used routinely. However, if an infestation does occur and other methods don’t succeed in controlling it, synthetic pesticides can be used.

Many Canadian bylaws contain an exception of this sort, I’ve discovered; some even specify the number of cinch-bugs per tenth of a square meter that constitutes an infestation. Apparently property owners in Toronto must stand ready to explain any use of pesticides, so they need to count and record pest-levels.

Before I could ask any more questions, my informant told me I needed to go through the city’s Media Hotline, a clearance center for all requests to speak to City employees. The Hotline is currently processing my request; I’ll be back to you after they get back to me.

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Posted in Environment, Lawns & Grass, Pests and Pesticides

Shop-Vac as Organic Gardening Tool: Suck Up those Cinch Bugs

March 18, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

You heard it here first—

In yesterday’s list of weird things I’ve learned while researching a website on organic lawn care, I mentioned the use of Shop-Vacs against cinch bugs.  Here’s the low-down.

Organic gardeners are used to the idea that household items lead double lives in the garden. Lemon juice, vinegar, salt and sugar are all used against weeds or insects, old sheets protect plants from frost. Now the Shop-Vac too can be pressed into the organic line of duty.

That’s right; you too can join the new suburban craze; take your Shop-Vac out to the front lawn and vacuum up cinch bugs! Where neighbors used to visit over barbeques, now they compare their cinch-bug catches, peering into the bellies of each other’s shop-vacs to see who made today’s big haul.

It’s not here yet, but it may be coming, and when it does, I’m going to go out on my front lawn and cheer. (I won’t join in, because there’s no grass in my front lawn, just pine needles.)

The guy who recommends the method insists that “it works!” He’s David Patriquin, a Professor of Biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and he’s got an amazing web of web-pages devoted to cinch bug control.

Now, I’d never heard of these awful creatures before starting a writing project on organic lawn care, but apparently they can do a number on grass despite being only 4 mm (a quarter of an inch) long even as adults. While most pests only feed on grass during one phase of their many-staged lives, the cinch bugs devote themselves to it, through all 5 nymph stages and as adults. Fortunately the eggs and the first nymph stage are red, and therefore it’s possible to see them, even though they’re smaller than pinheads.

Patriquin’s page “Facing a Cinch-Bug Problem NOW?”  <http://www.versicolor.ca/lawns/chinchNOW.html>
walks the beleaguered lawn-owner through the diagnostic process, then offers a range of control options, most of which, however, are not yet legal in Canada (or weren’t when the page was last updated). Even insecticidal soaps and Neem are approved only for some pests, cinch bug not included. Why? Apparently this information is being given out only on a need-to-know-basis, and Patriquin doesn’t qualify.

Patriquin reports that the parks director in one small resort town on the Bay of Fundy keeps out an eagle eye for cinch bugs. When he finds a patch, he rakes the surrounding area into the center of the patch and then descends on it, Shop-Vac in hand.

So if you see your neighbor out front this summer with an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner, tackling not her car but her lawn, you may well decide that she’s lost it at last. (And with that husband, it’s a miracle it didn’t happen sooner.) But there’s another possibility: she’s going after cinch bugs.

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Posted in Lawns & Grass, Pests and Pesticides

Weird and irrelevant things I learned on the way to the organic lawn

March 17, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

"The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things—"  I’ll write about the relevant things too, but not this time.

These days I’m writing an article, a website really, on organic lawn care for Planet Natural, which I think of as my little local organic gardening store. That’s a bit (but only a bit) like thinking of the Mayo Clinic as your corner drugstore since Eric Vinje, who runs the place, ships products all over North America and gets interviewed on a semi-regular basis for a lot of "green" stories these days.  And that is the fault of the ladybugs, which is another story.

"Yeah, I just got off the phone with this guy from –" what was it this time, the Washington Post? I forget. If he’s looking for sympathy, he’s looking in the wrong place. He may be Mr. Rising Star of the organic gardening, but we’re a ways yet from a point at which I have to call him "sir" or he has to tuck in his shirt.

So like I said, I’m writing this article, and the most amazing stuff drifts across my computer screen. It’s one of the fringe benefits of the research-and-write job: there’s all the information you learn about the actual topic, but there’s all this other stuff too, the odd facts that come zinging in at an acute angle to the story as I understand it, go whang into the center of the piece and stick there, quivering.

Here’s a sample:

There are over 200 public lawn bowling greens in present-day Glasgow.

The Levitts, who built some of the early cookie-cutter suburban developments in the US, (including the first Levittown, on Long Island) didn’t believe in basements (they pioneered cement-slab houses), but they set up a little newspaper for each development.

–The first North American golf courses were built in Canada.

–Up to 50% of homeowners who use pesticides don’t read the labels or follow the directions.

–Clover used to be considered a desirable part of upscale lawns.

–Almost none of the turfgrasses available in North America are native to the continent.

–Lawn bowling or one of its close cousins is five to seven thousand years old.

–The pesticide Mancozeb is marketed under at least fifteen other names.

–Almost everything Americans (Canadians too, probably) did to care for their lawns in the 50s encouraged crab grass.

–A hundred and thirty-eight Canadian towns and cities (including 2 million-strong Toronto) and one entire province (Quebec) have banned the cosmetic use of all synthetic pesticides.

–Switzerland banned 2,4D in 1988.

–You can vacuum up cinch bugs from a lawn, and at least one parks director in Nova Scotia does so regularly.

–In parts of Canada, pyrithium is legal against certain pests, but insecticidal soap and NEEM are not. Go figure.

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Posted in Lawns & Grass