Reply to Does it bother you when neighbors use pesticides on their lawn?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Okay, totally ignorant here and admitting this up front. I actually live in a different area of the country (Texas), and we're first-time homeowners in terms of a house with a yard (in condos prior).

Our yard is a hot mess - tons of weeds. More than one could ever pull, and extremely ugly. The last owners didn't keep up with it. All of our neighbors have good yards, many seem to use a service. We're planning on having a service come in and spray 8x over the course of the season to try to eradicate the weeds and let the grass grow back.

Other than chemicals = bad, what's the big deal? Does it contaminate the water? They're pretty protective on water here and we haven't received anything saying not to use chemicals on your lawn.

So, follow up, since we don't get a hard freeze down here, you really do have to spray your house for bugs to prevent termites, ants, spiders, scorpions. Our house has the port where you can pump the chemicals through tubes in the walls too, but I've been told by many people in the area you MUST spray externally to prevent problems.

If you live in a bug-prone area, particularly destructive bugs like termites, how are you supposed to deal with them without pesticide?

All genuine questions - I'm open to doing things differently. I honestly had no idea this was an issue for people. [/quote]

The big deal is that pesticides have health risks to humans.  They are implicated in cancers (leukemia, lymphomas specifically), and do you really want to risk your families health (and pet health) for a nice looking lawn?  I don't understand that.  Our lawn looks like crap, with tons of weeds and clover (more weeds than actual grass) and we keep it mowed short so from a distance you can't tell.  I would never want to risk my families health for a perfect looking lawn.  Makes no sense to me.  If you wear shoes in the house or have dogs then you are tracking it all through your house, into your carpets where it can be absorbed for years, then your baby is crawling on those carpets.  Yuck.  Not to mention what it does to wildlife walking through or eating vegetation in your lawn.  Do you think that the rabbits and birds want to be eating that stuff?

I don't know anything about scorpions, but we do not have a pest company prophylactically spray for anything, nor do we ever use a pest company.  If we have ants we set out Terro traps outside, not inside, and that takes care of the problem in a day or so.  Spiders we don't care about--we get lots of them but they aren't harmful so we leave them alone.  We get a lot of bugs but I just ignore them--who wants toxic pesticides sprayed in their house where kids and pets can ingest that stuff?  Cockroaches would be the only pest I would be concerned about, but we avoid bringing them in by not keeping boxes or grocery bags in the house (a common way they get in), and keeping things very clean.  But if I did get them I would try all other non-toxic or natural methods first before resorting to a pest company.[/quote]

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