1.
Hand picking can be very effective.
Get around their ‘drop and roll’ defense by snagging them early in the
morning when they’re slow and sluggish. Place a pan with some soapy
water in the bottom below the infested area, reach for the beetles from
above, so they can’t fly away, and they’ll drop right down into the
water.
2. Smother the beasts with a spray of good old
insecticidal soap. Just be sure
to spray the
beetles, not the
plants; soap sprays have to coat the bug to be effective.
3. Plug a
vacuum
cleaner (preferably a shop vac) into the nearest grounded outlet
and hose the little nasties up like they was dust bunnies under a
couch.
4. Make beetle-repelling “
bug juice” with your catch! Whiz a
handful of the sucked-up beasts in an old garage-sale blender with a
pint of water (this alone should make you feel much better!), strain
the resulting slurry and spray it on your plants. Old time farmers
swear that pests won’t go near plants that have been sprayed with the
remains of their relatives.
5. If you’re a wuss (or only have one blender), try
making a more congenial repellant by whizzing up two cloves of
garlic and a hot pepper in that pint
of water instead of the pests. Strain, add a drop each of dishwashing
soap and vegetable oil (or better still, insecticidal soap and
horticultural oil), and spray it on the plants under attack early in
the morning.
6. Or cut to the chase and soak plants under attack
with one of those commercially available
garlic sprays designed to deter
mosquitoes; see last week’s Q (
http://www.gardensalive.com/article.asp?ai=572)
for all the details. It should work even better than a home-made spray,
AND the area will be free of biting bugs for a couple of weeks as a
bonus!
7. If nothing less than an
insecticide will suit you, make
it a non-chemical, non-toxic one. The natural product
Neem—derived
from an Indian tree—should kill any beetles it hits and act as a
‘feeding deterrent’ to repel future attackers.
8. Luckily, Cathy in Delaware is wrong—
birds DO eat Japanese beetles. So
create a beetle buffet by placing
birdbaths,
feeders
and
nesting
boxes near the plants under attack. And don’t chase away
starlings! These so-called ‘pest’
birds feed on both the adults AND their grub-babies in your lawn!
9. Fruit trees and grape vines can be protected from
beetles (and the many other pests they attract) with a
clay-based insect barrier, like
Garden’s Alive’s “
Surround
at Home”. These sprays coat the plant with a thin gray film that
repels both insects and disease, and smothers any pests you actually
hit with the spray!
10.
Traps do catch lots of beetles
(and yes, the sight of that wriggling bag filled with defeated
defoliators is very satisfying), but they also have the potential to
greatly INCREASE beetle damage. That’s because the lures attract about
four times as many beetles as would otherwise try and ravage your
roses, but about half of the pests bounce off and escape the bag,
effectively doubling your beetle battle. Experts say they work best
when used as a perimeter control, positioned on the furthest outskirts
of your property, far away from the plants under attack.
