Japanese Beetles and Grubs: Trap, Spray, and Control Them: Easy-Growing Gardening, #8

By Rosefiend Cordell

Japanese beetles arrived in America in 1916. Since then, the beetle has cut a destructive swath across a great portion of the United States.

Japanese Beetles and Grubs: Trap, Spray, and Control Them is an indispensable guide for home gardeners, landscape professionals, and farmers. This Japanese beetle book is your secret weapon to help you control the beetles and safeguard your trees, roses, and vegetables.

This book walks you through many methods for stopping Japanese beetles, whether through organic means or (in some cases) chemical means. The book relies mainly on eco-friendly ways to control these garden pests so you don't have to rely on harsh chemicals.

In researching this book, I read through agricultural bulletins from the past and today. I've gleaned information from many University Extension sources and scientific studies, as well as good old-fashioned field work, to find out which control methods work (and which don't). I've put every control method I could find into this book, in order to give the gardener as many options as possible in vanquishing these pests.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosefiend Publishing
• Release date: Jul 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953196224

Rosefiend Cordell

This is the gardening pen name for Melinda R. Cordell. Former city horticulturist, rose garden potentate, greenhouse manager, perennials factotum, landscape designer, and small-time naturalist. I've been working in horticulture in one way or another since 1989. These days I write gardening books because my body makes cartoon noises when I move, and I really like air-conditioning. Good times!

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Rosefiend Publishing.

Copyright © 2017 Melinda R. Cordell

All rights reserved. Although the author has made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from one dozen starving crazed weasels, eating dirt, bulldozer races, the cat barfing in the middle of the night, food poisoning, traveling back in time and accidentally keeping your parents from meeting, outraged mallards, paper cuts, not knowing the words to Back in Black, or any other cause.

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Introduction

You know what’s crazy? Fifteen years ago, I used to be in complete charge of a rose garden with over 300 roses in it, and I didn’t know what a Japanese beetle looked like.

This is true. But it’s simply because we didn’t have Japanese beetles in my part of Missouri at that time. Can you imagine that? Occasionally I’d see a shiny green beetle on a rose blossom, but only rarely. I don’t even know if I squished any, but it was highly doubtful. My main contentions were trying to get all the roses fertilized and watered, and at the time I was mainly vigilant about rose rosette disease.

At least I didn’t have to contend with Japanese beetles AND rose rosette disease at the time. That would have been a mess.

In 2008, I went to St. Paul, Minnesota to summer residencies to get my MFA in writing. Only then did I understand what Japanese beetles were. I was aghast! The Hamline University campus is gorgeous, with a variety of neat little trees and shrubs and flowers that I admired greatly. On one side of the campus, next to the music building, they had a bunch of rugosa and landscape roses. Every time I passed them on the way to a workshop or class or a reading, I’d see the lovely rose blossoms covered with masses of shiny green and bronze beetles. Masses of them, crawling all over each other and eating their way through the satiny rose petals and the leaves. I always stopped to grab beetles off the rose blossoms and smash them. Oh, I hated them! Thank goodness we don’t have these in Missouri, I said.

Well.

Last year, we got a bunch of them.

And this year ... ye gods. The Japanese beetles have extended their evil empire into my state.

If you, too, are being absolutely besieged by Japanese beetles, this book will give you ways to fight these invading hordes, in ways that those who have full-time jobs and children can manage.

Before we go into battle, though, note that fighting Japanese beetles can, in some places, be an endless task. These beetles are highly mobile, flying from place to place. They don’t blacken the sky the way the grasshopper hordes did, back in the old days. However, they still do a number on your apple and peach trees, and on your roses, and your linden trees, and a number of other plants. The control methods in this book should help mitigate the damage, and some of these may be enough to help rescue your poor plants from the worst of the damage. In some places, where the infestation is light, it might clean up the beetles altogether.

Now, when I started researching this book, most of the useful information I found was on the University Extension websites. I always recommend your local University Extension agent – there’s an office in each county – but even here, I wasn’t finding enough of the information I was looking for. What I wanted was a full dossier of the Japanese beetle and their habits.

As a horticulturist (and a gal who got an A in her Entomology class when she was in college), I learned several important rules in dealing with diseases and bug infestations.

1)  Know thy enemy. If you want to do an effective job in bug control, you have to get a positive ID of the pest, and then you have to know its habits, you have a better chance of stopping the infestation in its tracks.

So, if you have a problem with the spotted cucumber beetles, then you know you can find it on your squash, zucchini, and cucumber plants – and also in the blossoms of your white and yellow roses, eating the middles out of them so all the petals drop off. If you have both kinds of plants in your yard, you can spray the beetles in the garden AND spray them in your rose blossoms. Otherwise, you have a whole bunch of beetles hanging out on your roses while you’re spraying in the garden – and then they come back and reinfest the cucurbits you just cleaned up.

Another example is squash bugs. If you know that the eggs look like a raft of little red eggs, you can find them on the bottoms of squash leaves, you can go on scouting missions and squash every raft. You also know when the squash bugs will be flying – so, just before they emerge, you can clear all the leafy mulch out from under your plants (some might be hiding in there) and wrap your cucurbits in floating row covers nice and tight so no squash bugs can crawl in. Then,