Click beetles
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| No, not that kind of annoying insect. That is Melissa Click |
The fenced in garden has a history of wire worms/click beetles. AND....the pea crop crashed due to seeds not germinating. Total collapse. Wire worms are very mobile. They live in the upper layers of the soil profile in the spring and fall and migrate to the moister, cooler, lower levels in the summer.
They also home-in on germinating seeds by sense of smell and by CO2 concentration.
There are several things I can do. I can spray the bottoms of the furrows with Bifenthrin before planting the seeds. The wire worms will get whacked as they home-in on the seeds.
Or I can "bait" with marble sized lumps of bread dough. The yeast makes CO2 and smells edible. Like the seeds, I would have to spread a durable insecticide in the soil beneath/around the bait.
Organic methods are iffy. There are very few crops or types of cover that do not support them. The wire worms can spend up to SIX YEARS in their larval stage so the gardener needs to be persistent over a long period.
Supposedly, there are some kinds of nematodes that will attack the wire worms but the wire worms have chitin scales that act like armor and they don't sit still and give the nematodes time to drill in.
Action plan
The time-window where I could plant snap peas and still have time for warm season crops to use the same fence for support is past. It is time to write-off peas and focus on make cucumbers and pole-beans a success.
Since it will be three weeks before I plant those two crops, I have time to use the "bait" method. I think two "lines" of bread-dough marbles on a 1" grid inside the fence should put a dent in the population close to the fence.
I also need to remember to spray the bottoms of the furrows before I plant seeds in the rows in the middle of the garden.
Ironically, big seeds are more vulnerable than smaller seeds. I guess it is because they emit more CO2 and smell.
Yep, I have the same issue here in the Inland Northwest!
ReplyDeleteI baited mobile larvae with cut pieces of supermarket spuds with "flag sticks" for a couple weeks after digging out crops last Fall. Those went into the trash. Heavy tilling subsequent then to get soils in the bed maximum exposure to hard frosts.
This week I planted small seeds into last year's affected beds. I will do a good soil drench with two weekly Neem Oil applications over the next couple weeks.
If I get no joy with this approach, I am going to have to go "chemical".
Da Perfessor
IF you raise chickens then you can use my Grandmothers wireworm control. Her chicken house had two fenced yards for the chickens. The garden is in one, the chickens in the other. Next year they trade places. Between an effective crop rotation and her free ranging chickens, she seldom suffered from wireworms in her beloved potatoes.
ReplyDeleteGood point. That works with pigs also. Also pigs have a built-in rototiller. --ken
DeletePigs plus chickens for small clean up and crop rotation cures a lot of garden problems. Tilled, weeded, debugged for the most part and fertilized.
DeletePlus, you can EAT the well-fed animals afterwards.
Try that with that half empty plastic jug of bug killer.
That and I wonder where the heck I'm going to GET pesticides as the Greenie-Crazies are determined to eliminate them along with diesel-petrol for my powered tools..
Ouch... One more 'issue' to deal with!
ReplyDeleteSo far I’ve been blessed with no wire worms. But my second son has had problems in his ‘family’ plot where some had let spud volunteers grow several years in a row.
ReplyDeleteCurrently I’m fighting the slugs in my emerging peas — a sharp knife a few times a day plus a good reason to slightly share a beer just before evening.
The Third Horseman on the black horse will be here soon.---ken
ReplyDeleteIn 2019, we broke out 12 acres of established pasture to plant CBD/floral hemp, in raised beds with plastic mulch and irrigation driptape. Wireworms chewed untold thousands of holes in the driptape. Days were spent walking the rows listening for spewing water hitting the bottom of the plastic mulch or looking for wet spots where excess water was flowing out into middles between rows - and patching the worst leaks.
ReplyDeleteCould you still do snow peas as a late season crop? Also, if you sprout the seeds and plant them after the root shows, will they grow before the wire worms get them.
ReplyDeleteYes I can. I currently plan to plant them between my rows of potatoes approximately July 20. I have a bag of Sugar Daddy (bush) snap peas for that purpose.
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