Hey everyone! I hope you are all enjoying your weekends. I know I have been, especially with my steemit coins for 2018 coming in yesterday. Well, that is not the subject of today’s post. Instead, I wanted to talk a little about the insect infestation happening on our homestead.
Last year, we had a really heavy Japanese Beetle infestation. They mainly targeted our grape vines and a couple of fruit trees, but we were able to get the problem under control using traps to catch them. Well this year, they have come out 10-fold eating everything in their paths. I read somewhere that it can take a few years to greatly reduce their population.
These little guys have not only been eating our grapes and fruit trees, but they have started moving on to our garden plants like broccoli, corn, green beans. I guess one can say that they are not a picky bug, but we are going to try to get rid of as many as we can without using any chemicals. We like to keep our foods as natural and organic as possible, so the first course of action I think will be taken is to place our Japanese beetle traps back outside.
This was done last year and it seemed to work fairly well for us and we even bought a couple more of them to place on our property. If you haven’t heard of them before, the traps work by placing a lure to draw in the beetles which then fall into a bag that they cannot escape. Overtime, the bags can accumulate quite a few beetles, which then requires you to dispose of the beetles in the reusable bags, so that more can be caught. This will give us 4 traps total outside, so I guess we will have to wait and see if it works again this year.
I would be very interested to hear if any of you have a natural way that works for your Japanese beetle problems.
Thanks for reading!