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Japanese Beetle Alert!

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In case you have not noticed, Japanese Beetles are in full feeding frenzy. If you see leaves of your plants beginning to look like lace doilies, you probably have Japanese Beetles feeding on them. They are easy to identify – bronze wing covers and a row of little tufts of white hair along their back side. If you see them, you may notice that they are often doing what nature intended them to do, procreate. They are voracious feeders and breeders. They love to feed on grape leaves, flowering shrubs, roses, rose flowers, lindens and an assortment of other trees and shrubs. The female will look for a suitable place to burrow into a lawn, lay her eggs and move on. The eggs hatch into grubs, which feed on the root system of the grass. One advantage of the dry weather is that the eggs, once laid, only stay viable if the soil is moist, as they draw moisture from the soil. If you are watering your lawn, you may have a problem with grubs later on in the late summer or early fall.

Preventing Japanese Beetles

If you haven’t applied a preventative grub control material to your lawn, now would be a good time. In regards to controlling the adults, just about any commercially-available insect control product will work on them. If the adults are feeding on your vegetable plants, be sure to read the label before purchasing the product to make sure it can be used on vegetables and look for the harvest interval between application and consumption. You may have also seen hawthorn apples covered with orange colored horns. This is due to a disease called rust . This rust is common on apples, hawthorns and quince. It is often called cedar apple rust, cedar hawthorn rust or cedar quince rust. The reason why is that the disease goes back and forth between a cedar tree, like an arbor vitae, and the other trees. It is an interesting disease to read about and if you do a search on one of the combinations, you will be able to learn more about the disease. Controlling the disease requires a series of lawn disease control applications starting in the spring, so it is too late to do much about it now.