Natural pest control

Our night time pest controller

Tom and I were absolutely stumped when we saw an ad on tv (we were away, we do not have television at home, so we are a bit out of touch in regards to commercial tv…). The ad was promoting a little gadget you put in a power point, which then regularly sprays “smell free” pesticide into your house. We were gobsmacked! 

People buying that gadget would be voluntarily poisoning themselves to get rid of pests! No wonder most of the other ads on tv were for health insurance 😉 Since we live such a simple lifestyle and are not influenced by daily ads on tv telling us what to buy and where to go, we tend to think that most people are at least aware of possible adverse effects to health and environment from association with pesticides.

Anyway, that ad combined with the nightly noise in our kitchen, brought me to write this article. See, we too have pest control in our house, sometimes even more than one! Every night when the light goes off, we hear some noise in the kitchen. Our nightly visitors come in through the kitchen window, which we leave open for them. If the window is closed, they will persist to croak or jump up against the window until we open it for them… Croak and jump??? Yes, our pest controllers are green tree frogs.

They make themselves at home in our kitchen at night, in the sink and on the bench. Our doors and windows are always open during the day, and plenty of bugs make their way into the house. Our green tree frogs clean them up at night. The only payoff is finding the occasional frog poop on the sink, but they are very easily cleaned up. We really enjoy having our nightly visitors, they make a bit of a racket sometimes, but it is comforting to know that our environment here is healthy enough to attract these wonderful pest controllers. We do get an abundance of many varieties of frogs on our property, which make for a fantastic choir when it rains in summer.

It would be wonderful to see more people accepting that nature has its own form of pest control, and encouraging those forms of pest control to flourish. Unfortunately, environmental stresses have a major effect on the amphibian population in the world, and I read somewhere recently that amphibians are the highest on the list of endangerment, with a large percentage on the road to extinction. I also heard that amphibians are a great indicator of the health of the environment. If this is true, it should frighten everyone that amphibians are not doing so well. It also should be a goal for all people to establish a healthy environment for amphibians (which then in turn becomes a healthy environment for so many other species). Nature looks after its own, and it will control pests without pesticides if you allow nature to do its job…

Author: Zaia Kendall

Zaia grew up in a family of musicians in Holland, and has a background in top sport (snow skiing) and web development and design. She co-founded the PRI Luganville and PRI Sunshine Coast Inc (now PermEco Inc.) with Tom, and runs the “invisible structures”, like finances, business administration, website design and maintenance, writes articles and records and edits videos. She assists Tom in running the Kendall Permaculture Farm and supervising other volunteers. She is an active member of several musical projects and bands, involved in community music and runs percussion and marimba workshops, is the percussion leader for the Woodford Folk Festival People’s Orchestra and composes as well as plays music. She is passionate about community music and loves seeing people discover that they can play!