If you are growing tomatoes in your garden, you may not be the only vertebrate going for your hard earned harvest. Are rats feasting away in the garden? We have a couple resources we can share to help you reduce or prevent rat damage to your tomatoes.

Integrated Pest Management for Rats

• Our Pest Notes: Rats has information to help you with identification, biology and IPM options.
• This blog post provides additional information on using snap traps to catch rats and mice.
• If you are managing a school or community garden, you can...

Trapping is the safest and most effective method for controlling rats and mice in and around homes, garages, and other structures. Rodents that live in close association with humans are called commensal rodents. Rats and mice are the most frequently encountered commensal rodents in California.

Selecting the correct trap

Before trapping, make sure you know what rodent pest you have. It is a very common mistake to select the wrong size trap when you have not yet determined whether you have mice or rats (and the correctly identified rat species).

You will not catch a rat with a mouse trap, and you will not catch a mouse with a rat trap. To determine...

Two species of Blatta cockroaches can be common peridomestic pests in California, including the familiar oriental cockroach (B. orientalis) and a relative newcomer, the Turkestan cockroach (B. lateralis, Figure 1).  Adults of both species are large (usually one inch or more in length) and conspicuous insects that harbor and breed outdoors within moist crevices around structures, such as subsurface utility ports, voids associated with concrete expansion joints, and soil cracks formed at junctions of landscape and hardscape elements (Figure 2).

From these harborage sites, cockroaches venture out at night to feed on a wide variety of...