Beardsworths have been running a program of integrated pest management (IPM) since 1998. At that time IPM was primarily used and developed by the glasshhouse salad sector, we were very early adopters for the nursery stock sector.
IPM is a holistic approach to pest control across the whole nursery and not just the protected crops under glass and in tunnels. It can be broken down into three main areas, cultural, biological and chemical. Following is a few examples of how we apply these on the nursery.
Cultural
Cultural control is the management and manipulation of the environment in which your crop is growing. It covers area such as glasshouse temperature, air movement, growing media structure and nutrients, irrigation.
At Beardsworths we apply cultural techniques to the control of Downy Mildew in outdoor, container grown Hebes. Downy Mildew thrives in cool and damp conditions with low air movement, it proliferates mainly in spring and autumn but also summer when these conditions are present.
Using this knowledge we apply two cultural disease controls to Hebe production:
- The Hebes are spaced out on the beds to allow air movement around each individual shrub.
- Our irrigation is done overnight, the Hebes are placed on one of the final beds to be irrigated. This allows the leaves to dry out quickly during the day, rather than being wet all night.
Biological
Biological is the use of natural predators and pathogens to control nursery stock pests and diseases.
We introduce and use husbandry techniques to increase the levels of natural predators above their normal background levels. We use various parasitic wasps against Aphid and Whitefly, nematodes 
against Vine Weevil, and mites against Sciarid Fly.
For example, our Sciarid Fly program has been very successful at reducing are pesticide use in the propagation unit. The flies are attracted to decaying matter but their larvae also have a taste for newly rooting cuttings.
We use insulated boxes, filled with chicken manure to first attract the flies away from the crop. We then introduce the predatory mite Hypoaspis miles which not only controls the larvae on the boxes but also spreads across the propagation unit to keep the whole crop clean.
Chemical
Chemical control is the use of natural and synthetic pesticides. This whole approach aims to keep the use of chemical pesticides to a minimum.
We inevitably get the occasional hotspot outbreak of a pest, but after going to all the effort and expense of nurturing our natural predators it would be a little daft to spray them all with a broad spectrum insecticide. In these situations we use limited, localised sprays of target specific pesticides. These are products designed to only effect the target pest and not other insects.