Timely Gardening Tips for Where You Live

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Of equal concern are the environmental costs of the fuels used to harvest, process and then ship it long distances, which in your case is about 1,500 miles. That’s a lot of greenhouse gas emissions produced to provide organic matter for outdoor beds. Compost, shredded leaves and grass clippings would do as well and are less expensive.

Peat moss does have special characteristics that make it a better choice when used in small amounts as part of seed starting mixtures. It absorbs and holds 10 to 20 times its dry weight in water, and it is a very poor medium for various soilborne fungi, including those that cause seedling damping off. Beneficial bacteria can live in peat moss, so using small amounts of peat moss to start seeds indoors is a sound decision. Once seedlings grow big enough to transplant outdoors, compost makes a better soil amendment than peat because it contains a wealth of biological life-forms and a huge range of major and minor plant nutrients.

Battling Japanese Beetles

Has there been any improvement in the technology for removing Japanese beetles? We have rosebushes and a large grapevine, and by August we are inundated with Japanese beetles. When my father had them, it was our daily duty to pick them off and put them in a can of kerosene.

Dave Harvey
Swanzey, New Hampshire

Your father had the right idea by collecting Japanese beetles every day, because it stops signals given off by feeding beetles that attract more beetles: Handpicking can reduce overall feeding by half. Soapy water will work as well as kerosene. First thing in the morning, hold it under the leaf or bough where the beetles are feeding, and brush them down into it with your hand. The beetles won’t bite you, and as long as temperatures are cool they will fall into the water rather than fly away.

Other organic control measures include applying beneficial nematodes or milky spore disease to lawns to kill white grubs (Japanese beetle larvae), and growing plenty of flowers that provide nectar for Typhia miniwasps, which attack the beetles.

Research shows that commercial traps often attract more Japanese beetles than they catch, so they should not be placed near cultivated plants. 

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print