Common-Sense Pest Control Review

Common-Sense Pest Control is a thick comprehensive resource that covers everything from indoor house pests such as termites, rats, and cockroaches to pests that can have detrimental effects on humans and animals such as lice, ticks, and fleas, to lawn and garden pests such as gophers, aphids, snails and slugs. More importantly, it talks about the methods for controlling these pests in your home.

Though Common-Sense Pest Control comes in at $39.95, you definitely get your money's worth. The book is a hefty hardback, over 700 pages.

It is fairly dense reading, but a good table of contents and organization makes it easy to find what you're looking for. The chapters are divided into the following sections:

Basic Concepts

Chapter 1: Naming Living Things and Understanding Their Habits and Habitats. This covers the basics which you may or may not be interested in, such as the classification of life forms, systems and echo systems, energy and the food chain.

Chapter 2: Natural Pest Controls. This chapter talks about climate and weather, food and habitat, pathogens, predators and parasites, and more.

Chapter 3: Introduction to Integrated Pest Management. This chapter will help you to distinguish pests from "guests". It also discusses types of monitoring, deciding what is tolerable damage, and where and when to treat pests.

Chapter 4: Pest-Treatment Strategies and Tactics. This section discusses things such as criteria for selecting treatment strategies and the major treatment strategies available.

Beneficial Organisms

Chapter 5: Meet "the Beneficials". An introduction to beneficial organisms that can actually help your pest control efforts such as spiders, lady beetles, predatory mites, centipedes, predacious bugs, and more.

Pesticides

Chapter 6: Choosing the Right Chemical and Microbial Tools. Here, you can check out the pros and cons of various pesticides, including how they affect humans and the environment.

Chapter 7: Some Useful Inorganics, Organics and Botanicals. This chapter covers such topics as inorganic pesticides, insecticidal dusts, pesticidal soaps, horticultural oils, botanicals, and more.

Chapter 8: New Frontiers: Microbials, Pheromones and Insect Growth Regulators. This chapter breaks things down into such subjects as fungal pesticides, fungal insecticides, viral insecticides, insect-attacking nematodes, along with others. Detailed information tells you exactly what these things are.

Pests of the Human Body (each of the following chapters covers biology, detection and monitoring, damage, and various treatments for each organism).

Chapter 9: Pinworms
Chapter 10: Mites
Chapter 11: Lice
Chapter 12: Bedbugs and Conenose Bugs

Pests Inside the House (as above, each of the following chapters covers biology, detection and monitoring, damage, and various treatments for each organism).

Chapter 13: Pests of Fabric, Feathers and Paper
Chapter 14: Kitchen and Pantry Pests
Chapter 15: Fleas, Ticks, Heartworms and Mites
Chapter 16: Mice, Spiders and Bats

Pests of Indoor Plants

Chapter 17: Detecting Symptoms of Indoor Plant Problems
Chapter 18: General Management Strategies for House Plant Problems
Chapter 19: Preparing for Least-Toxic Pest Control
Chapter 20: Controlling Pests of Indoor Plants

Pests of the House Structure

Chapter 21: Identifying Structural Pests and Eliminating Moisture
Chapter 22: Woody Decay and Preservative Treatments
Chapter 23: Termites
Chapter 24: Carpenter Ants and Carpenter Bees
Chapter 25: Wood-Boring Beetles

Pests in the Garden

Chapter 26: Garden Design and Maintenance
Chapter 27: Meet the Weeds
chapter 28: Safe and Sane Weed Management
Chapter 29: Preventing Lawn Pests
Chapter 30: Least-Toxic Lawn Pest Management
Chapter 31: Pests of Food and Ornamental Gardens

Pests of the Community

Chapter 32: Pests of Shade Trees
Chapter 33: Rats
Chapter 34: Filth Flies
Chapter 35: Yellowjackets
Chapter 36: Mosquitoes

This is definitely a comprehensive book. One of the nice aspects is that references are cited at the end of each chapter rather than collectively at the end of the book, so if you're only interested in termites, for example, and want more information, it's easy to find very specific further resources. Common-Sense Pest Control isn't exactly bedtime reading, and I probably wouldn't recommend it if you only have one type of pest in your area that typically troubles you. However, if you are in a area where there are numerous insects and wildlife that might visit your house and garden, this is a good reference book to have one yourself.

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