You want to keep your home pest free. A pest free home keeps you, your family, your pets, and your belongings safe. There are any number of different types of insects or animals that might be trying to find its way into your cozy house and make it their own. But, you don’t want to fill your house with hazardous repellents. So, instead, consider some natural pest control strategies to keep those unwelcome guests at bay.
Pests: Not Just Bad For Property; Bad For Health
Pests aren’t just annoying, they can kill you. Mosquitoes spread malaria, Zika virus, West Nile virus, and general psychological malaise. Rodent carry various diseases harmful to humans. Spiders can bite you in the night, termites can erode the structural stability of your home, and bed bugs nip at you till you lose your mind. Venomous snakes can hide away in the garage causing life threatening bites to those unlucky enough to come in contact. And we all know how nasty cock roaches are. They carry bacteria including salmonella, staphylococcus and streptococcus.
To maintain property value, it’s integral that you get rid of pests. However, this is a lot easier, sometimes, to conceive than to achieve. Certainly you can simply fumigate the entire premises, and that will kill everything inside with toxic gas. But that toxic gas residue will remain, and it could also end up causing you and your family health problems in the long run.
A better way to go about this is using organic, natural solutions. At the Organic Lesson official blog there are a lot of tips and tricks on keeping your home clean and pest free organically. Following, we’ll additionally explore a few things you can do to get the pests out, and keep your premises free of bugs, vermin, or any other undesirable critters.
A Clean & Airtight Property
First and foremost, you’ve got to clean. The more you clean, the more you can catch pests before they become invasive. Your basements and attics are going to be hot-beds for bugs and vermin. You need to clean these areas with regularity. The same goes for your garage. Under sinks, water tends to warp wood and encourage bugs to come. Clean these areas.
Open windows are good in summer, but make sure you’ve got good screens. Even so, bugs will sometimes get in. If you could totally seal your home and only use HVAC solutions, this will solve the problem, but that’s not feasible for most. Still, don’t just leave a window open for weeks on end—especially if there’s no screen over it.
For bed bugs, you can kill them with extreme cold. Do you live in a cold climate? Take a week long trip to the tropics in the dead of winter, open some screen windows, turn off the water, and freeze ‘em out. You can do that inside 48 to 72 hours, it’s just got to get down below freezing for that time, and the bugs will freeze. This applies to many insects, not just bed bugs.
Spiders, Indoor Plants, Outdoor Plants, And Pest-Free Properties
Do you hate spiders with a passion like the majority of mainstream America? Well, the same vitriol you have for spiders, arachnids tend to have for both vinegar and peppermint. It makes sense; imagine you were the size of a thumbnail and encountered the strong odor of peppermint in quantities outweighing your body. It would choke you!
You can use peppermint sprays across doorways to keep the spiders away. Vinegar also helps. Keeping rosemary plants discourages mosquitoes and fleas.
If moths are a problem, instead of using mothballs, use a natural propellant. Make sachets with cloves and lavender. Put them in your drawers and closets.
Now, indoor plants can help to purify the air in your home and beautify the premises, but they can also encourage creatures like aphids, ants, spiders, or other bugs to take residence inside them. You might want to put plants somewhere where such bugs won’t irritate occupants of the home, and use natural pest control means like vinegar on them as well.
Here are some handy tips for maintaining indoor plants to help you keep them healthy, and keep pests away. Certain plants, like citronella, are actually toxic to mosquitoes; so as a bonus, if you’ve got the right sort of flora, you can keep pests away from not just the interior of your home, but the outside as well. There are a lot of ways to do this, find which methods best fit you and keep your home pest free.