Tips to fight yard, house pests after heavy rain

HOUSTON (KTRK) -- Our recent rain fall will bring out the bugs and the fungus too, but there are things you can do to take control of your of your home and yard.

Ants, roaches, brown patch -- the rain is bringing them out but you can fight back.

If you have fire ants in your yard, or your lawn is turning brown or heaven forbid roaches inside your home you can blame it all on our recent rain fall.

"Because of the rain, a lot of outside bugs are going to try to come inside. You have a controlled environment inside. It's dry, it's an even temperature, there's food," said Ken Bernard with Solutions Self-Chem.

Bernard is seeing a steady stream of people worried about pests and brown patch. Barnard says if your yard is turning yellow apply a fungicide.

"Kind of like lettuce that's been in a crisper too long. It's going to be kind of rotten. And that's what it does it's a disease that rots it," he said.

The reason roaches are a problem is because wet weather is forcing them to find dry ground so Bernard says apply an insecticide to the exterior of your home.

"We recommend that you spray the base of the house. Around the doors, the windows. We recommend that you spray the weep holes if it's a brick house," Bernard said.

As for fire ants, the rain is making them build mounds to keep the hive dry.

"When there's a lot of rain, the ground gets really saturated. It gets really wet and uncomfortable and a little bit dangerous so they kind of have to move everything up," said Erin Mills, an entomologist at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. "So that's when you see a lot of those mounds pop up above ground so that they can get everything out above the water."

You can spend about $100 treating brown patch and bugs.

As for mosquitoes, you already know how to deal with them: Dump any standing water as soon as it stops raining.