Sometimes I get a little bit frustrated with the acronym IPM. It’s a buzz word farm advisors, extension specialists and Master Gardens often use to inspire home gardeners to think about the big picture when tackling gardening and pest issues. My problem is with the name. First of all it's not catchy.  It doesn't spell anything and even when you do spell it out -Integrated Pest Management.  It's about as inspiring as an accounting textbook (my apologies to all those accountants out there).

But here's the real skinny, it works!  Something was doing a number on our penstemon in the garden, turning it a coppery color and generally sucking the life out of it.  Aside from choosing the right plant for the right place, IPM involves properly identifying the pest.  So I grabbed a few leaves and took a peek underneath them. There was slight webbing, but no critters to speak of.

So I brought it into the office and shoved that little guy under the microscope. It was a text book case of spider mites.  It literally looked exactly like picture on the spider mite pest note. The eggs were pretty!

According to the pest note, dry, dusty conditions contributed to the problem. We decided to give the plants a good spray with the hose every time we were at the garden. That seemed to help some.

But add a little plant knowledge and some lucky weather and we managed to skip considering any pesticides at all. We trimmed back all the penstemon (keep in mind that penstemon responds very well to a good trimming, it may not work well with every plant). Mother Nature pitched in with a lovely rain and our penstemon bounced back like a trooper.

We’ll never be sure what technique did the trick, we suspect it was a combination of them all, and that may be the biggest lesson of all that IPM can teach us, it’s the combination of techniques that works, not the one shot of a pesticide that does the trick.