HOME GARDENS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 90, 1 September 1950, Page 6

HOME GARDENS

(By J. S. Yeates, Massey Agricultural College)

SOME PLANT PESTS

If it were not for pests and diseases, gardening would be much less complicated. To make the best of a bad job, the most satisfactory methods of controlling some bad pests are mentioned below.

Slugs and snails are amongst the worst pests of vegetable and flower gardens in the spring. There is a shortage of young succulent food material at this time of the year and the snail family will naturally concentrate on what little they can find. In many gardens the owner does not know why his young cabbages, lettuce, delphinium shoots, or the like, seem to be making little progress. An inspection by torch on some mild evening will soon show if slugs and snails are doing the damage. As for controlling the slugs and snails, the first principle is clean gardening. Do not leave any unne-

cessary material, living or non-liv-ing, under which slugs and snails can harbour. In a vegetable garden, grass or weeds near the beds is suitable cover.- Any scrap of wood or loose stone or brick serves as a hiding place. Killing them is a different problem. The good old-fashioned ways are hand killing and dusting. .with lime. The hand method gives a great deal of satisfaction if you have any felings of revenge. Simply go out at night with a torch among the plants being attacked, and pick up the slugs and snails as you see them. You may then crush them on the path with your shoe, or drop them into a bucket of hot water or burnt lime, whichever gives you more satisfaction.

The best modern method against slugs is the use of metal fuel mixtures. ' You can buy these ready mixed, or else buy the ingredients separately and mix them yourself. Metal fuel is sold as white sticks some two or three inches long, and was used to heat hair curlers, or for alpine cookers. One of the sticks, crushed to powder, can be mixed with a pint to a quart of bran or oatmeal. I mix it by shaking them in a jam jar with screw on lid. Place a narrow band of this to intercept slugs on the way to your plants, and the next day you should find slugs lying parafysed or almost withered away to nothing. You may not realise how many slugs it catches, because in the sun they soon practically disappear. The metal fuel is harnjless to animals and pets, but is best handled not with bare hands, but always with a set of utensils reserved for it. The merest trace on the hands gives a very bitter taste to any food

you handle. Grass Grub The grass grub does far more harm than most of us imagine. Quite apart from the damage to grass roots in pasture and lawns it attacks the roots of many garden plants with disastrous results. Its damage is done underground, and therefore we commonly do not realise why the plants are making poor growth. The grub which does the damage is creamy-coloured with a bluish tinge in parts. It is usually curled almost into a complete circle about a third of an inch across. The body of the grub is about one eighth of an inch through. The parent beetles lay their eggs in October,

November and December. The grubs which hatch from the eggs burrow down into the ground, where they live on the roots until the following spring, when they produce beetles again and the cycle starts once more. The important point is that each grub lives only one season, and a new infestation commences in late spring. The commonest method of combating this pest is by mixing lead arsenate powder in the soil. Approximately one ounce of lead arsenate per square yard is used. Tliis amount should be mixed in the top inch or so of soil, and will be effective for two or three years.