Yeah plants not gonna cut unfortunately
I’m sure you know all about being vigilant dumping standing water regularly through the week. Gotta get immediate neighbors on board too - or ask if you can dump their water. |
I get multiple bites walking from the house to the car. I am pondering the spraying service. |
You should do the opposite. As posted previously, the best approach is to put out dunks in those standing water spots. Collapse the adult population in an area. The primary challenge is to do it over a large enough area to be effective. |
You might as well hand me the money, turn around, and I'll kick you in the behind. Spraying only kills the adults in a small area and is a temporary reprieve. See above post for more effective alternative. |
Don't mind any of those plants. |
The dunks don’t seem to work, at least to an extent that we notice. I have no idea where standing water would be. Can they populate in moist dirt? |
One, the dunks kill the larva, not the adults. Thus they destroy future generations from spawning, not the current one. Two, how broad of an area are you using them in? It needs to be over a large enough area to crash the adult population. Thus, the reason its a community wide effort. Otherwise, there is nothing you can do except wear clothing to protect, wear sprays with DEET, and/or use fans with enough blowing force to overcome their limited flight strength when engaging in outdoor activities. |
This is fantasy gibberish. Unless you can control the area for a tenth of a mile or more - you aren’t going to make a dent in any population - really even with limiting standing water (they will grow next door or in wet leaves or soil too). And if you do have a lot of space bats, toads, frogs, and birds are far greater predators than insects - which you can encourage to flourish by not using pesticides. And you don’t need native plants to attract the bugs that do eat mosquitos (spiders, ants, mosquito hawks). But really there’s not much you can do. Citronella candles and tiki torches plus bug spray is your best bet. |
I’ll add the best success I have, which I did anytime we want to sit outside is with tiki torches creating a lot of smoke and citronella candles for the scent. Plus the pet friendly fogger that smells like it’s mostly peppermint oil that they sell at Home Depot I spray around the yard 30 minutes before we eat. It keeps them at bay for a while. I found instead of a systemic approach that an on demand localized approach was more effective. |
Plants don't repel mosquitos. Eliminating standing water and damp, rotting plants/foliage will help, though. |
The best shade plants that repel mosquitos are the ones you spray with bifenthrin. |
One home depot bucket filled half way with water and some leave and a quarter of a mosquito dunk works for my .3 acre lot. I notice a big difference without it. I leave it under the deck. |
Swallows and bats |
This definitely won't work either. I have a very wild garden full of natives and tons of bugs - still lots of mosquitoes. |