Ezzirah,

Well, I doubt you can do exactly what I do. I keep a coffee can with me when I'm digging and I dump each and every one of those grubs into that can. By the time I've turned over the soil in a bed, I've cleaned it out and it is grub-free, or maybe mostly grub-free because I probably miss one here and there. (So far, this is what you can do.)

Then, I go over to the chicken coop and dump the grubs into the middle of the fenced chicken run, and the chickens gobble them up in about 15 seconds. (This is the part you cannot do, unless you have chickens or guineas or something similar.)

In lieu of feeding them to the chickens, you still can collect them and dispose of them using the manner of your choice....step on them and squish them,, drop them into a pail of soapy water and let them drown, etc.

I don't know that grubs harm veggie roots anyway because veggie roots are spaced more widely apart than grass roots which are their preferred chow, but I always remove them from my beds when I find them.

For long term control, there are chemicals you can use in lawn areas but not in veggie areas if you prefer to go the chemical route. If you prefer organics, the keys to success with grubs are beneficial nematodes and Milky Spore. I used both when we moved here in 1999 and haven't had to use either one since. You will never achieve 100% control of grubs because the beetles continually move into your previously treated landscape. Most of the standard-size grubs you see are the Japanese beetle grubs and you want to kill them all. Then, you need to get a Japanese beetle trap like Dorothy uses and have it out at the right time to control arriving Japanese beetles before they can do too much damage.

I do think I am seeing many, many more grubs this year---probably as many as I've seen in the previous 5 years combined and I am not at all happy about it. It might be time for me to buy and use beneficial nematodes and Milky Spore powder again.

No matter how you grow your tomatoes, grubs will move into the bed whether it is at grade level or raised, so the key is to aggressively remove them and then treat the soil for them using only methods approved for use near edible crops.

Take the appearance of the grubs seriously because they are an indicator of a looming battle with beetles. I should add that not all beetles are bad. There are native ground beetles that eat pest insects, but Japanese beetles and their grubs are bad guys.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: How Beneficial Nematodes Work

Question: I am not above putting them in a can, sealing it, then throwing it in the trash or something. What is a beetle trap? If I remove them from where I plant, don't more just move in?

They are a whole lot less than last year, when I doused the yard for them, so I am glad of that. The lady at the extension office told me to wait until mid june to do anything, that is when they are close to the surface. I just didn't know what would happen to the plants that are going in the ground before mid june...

I put them in the middle of the driveway and the birds love 'em!

Susan

Ezzirah,

I'll link an image of a beetle trap. Here in my part of Oklahoma they are found pretty easily at places like Lowe's, Home Depot or Tractor Supply. However, they can sell out fast once the Japanese beetle flight begins, so my advice is to buy one whenever you see it this spring and then save it and put it out once beetles are appearing.

I remember that last year or the year before, Dorothy trapped an incredible number of Japanese Beetles in her trap.

When you hand-remove them, others may or may not move in. I don't generally find more back in my just-cleared beds though. Your results may vary.

I've also made a poor-man's beetle trap just by soaking alfalfa rabbit pellets in a 5-gallon bucket of water, and leaving the resulting 'tea' there in that bucket, with the water level several inches beneath the rim of the bucket. The beetles are attracted to the alfalfa tea and then drown in it. Every morning I'd just scoop them off the surface of the water and drop them on the ground.

Susan, I thought of recommending that and I used to do it when I lived in town, but it doesn't work in rural gravel driveways because the darn grubs tunnel under a piece of gravel before the birds can find them. I used to rototill the whole garden and turn the chickens loose in it to roam at will and dig and scratch and eat grubs, but gave that up when the chickens lost their free-range privileges after all of last year's 4-legged-predator trouble.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Example/Explanation of Japanese Beetle Traps

Unless you have 15 to 20 in a shovel full of dirt, you don't have enough to worry about, or put poison out.

I do like Dawn, and collect them as I find them, only I put them in a large plant saucer and set them out for the birds.

Moni.. a master gardener

I especially don't worry about the BIG grubs, as they are June Bug grubs. Try as I might, I can hardly find damage from June bugs. Still, our poultry adores them, and I feel somehow "wasteful" if I don't collect them while cultivating.

Japanese beetles, on the other hand, are BAD NEWS! I saw more of them here, in 2009, than ever before. A beetle trap (or several) is in order.

George
Tahlequah, OK

thank you once again for all your wonderful advice!!

I looked up a picture of june bugs, and june bugs is what I saw in the yard, and there is certainly not 15-20 a shovel full, it is more like 2-3 for 2 shovel fulls. Last year when we moved in this house everything was very neglected by the last owner due to the owner being in a nursing home. We sprayed several times last year, then I would have said there was a ton of them. Not this year, so hopefully what we did last year worked and it is not that it is just too early yet to see them.

But if they are harmless june bug grubs, then we are good. I am tickled pink at how good my soil actually is in the back yard, despite the clayish nature of it. :)

For some reason, June Bugs or any other similar looking bug with the spiny legs, gives me the complete willies. I think it is because we had so many of them downtown at our office building. One day, one got in my hair, and apparently was there most of the afternoon before someone noticed it. After that, it was me dancing around, trying to remove the darned thing while it buzzed and clung to the tendrils of hair - I think I truly was "dancing as fast as I could" trying to get that thing out! I'm sure it was the weirdest sight to see! But, arggggg! I now steer clear of them cuz I don't want them hibernatin' in the hair!

Susan

Susan, I don't care for June bugs either, and they start up really early here at our house, sometimes as early as latest April. They congregate around the porch lights, try to fly into the house when you open a door, etc. They don't mind landing on people and I hate it when they land on me.

We have a lot more June bugs here in our part of the state than Japanese beetles although I hate to jinx myself by saying that.

There is a good thing/bad thing about having grubs in rural areas here in southern OK. The good thing is that the armadilloes, skunks and other wild critters eat them so you have a built-in natural form of pest control. The bad thing is that they they will dig up every square inch of ground to find them.

On a spring or summer morning here, when you walk outside and it looks like someone ran a rototiller through all your garden beds and lawn overnight, that's a sign you have too many grubs. lol

In 2000, the wild things got into the garden looking for grubs (and there were many grubs that year) and dug up literally every plant I had in the ground on the night before Mother's Day. I awoke to find my previously lovely flower/veggie garden totally decimated. They had dug up sunflowers that were 3' tall, tomato plants, peppers, zinnias, onions, spinach, beans, corn, etc. We still refer to that as the Mother's Day Massacre (because the critter massacred the garden, not because we massacred them).

Even though the current fence has kept out all those wild critters (eerything except raccoons) in recent years, it is the reason I remove every grub I find....because I just don't need for there to be anything in the ground that would encourage any of those wild animals to find a way under or through the fence. It is bad enough that they tear up the unfenced areas.

I think the number of grubs I'm finding in the veggie garden is the highest I've seen it since 2000, probably 6 to 8 grubs per square foot. In lawn grass, I could care less, but I'm not happy about those grubs in the veggie garden. I'm even digging up my pathways to remove them. By the time I'm through digging, there shouldn't be any armadillo bait left in the fenced garden to attract those destructive animals.

I hadn't seen any Japanese Beetles here until last year, and they came in heavy last year. I found some on the okra plants but most of them stayed on the grape vine. I have never gotten a grape from that vine so that wasn't a big loss. That seemed to be the 'mating territory' and I would just knock them off into a jar of soapy water. It is much harder to sneak up on one bug and get it before it flies away, but with two at a time, I could fill the jar.

I also have flea beetles in the spring and if I don't cover the eggplant, they make lace out of the leaves. The only year that I have had success with eggplant here is the year I took Dawn's suggestion and kept it covered until it was about 14 inches tall.

As for June bugs...I have a frog that lives under the light just waiting for one to hit the ground, and they also provide entertainment for the cats.

Carol,

I may see six Japanese Beetles here on a bad day in a bad year so maybe they don't like our usual hot and dry springs/summers here. I hope that never changes as they seem worse the further north and east you go, and they seem to especially love visiting Dorothy's part of the state. We make up for it by having lots of June bugs and lots of grasshoppers.

Our frogs are out today as are the turtles. They're all sitting on the pond banks and enjoying the sun.

I hate flea beetles and they seem to love eggplant above all other plants. I will have damage from them sometimes on young tomato leaves. There must be a particular temperature at which they become more active and then less active because I think I only see damage from them in late March through about mid- to late-April.

Floating row covers are simply amazing! There are some crops like squash that I wish I could keep covered for the entire growing season.

Dawn

Isn't that the truth. I didn't have a squash bug problem last year at all though. I found one bug after she had layed eggs and I guess I got everything destroyed, then I found one more and squished it. That was all I saw. I had never had a horn worm, but found five last year in the VERY late fall just before the weather took out the tomato plants. None of those were in the garden and we all in container plants in the yard that were starting to get pretty stressed.

So far my biggest problems have been flea beetles, potato bugs, and slugs.

A lot of people mistake other beetles for the Japanese Beetle. There is one beetle in particular that is very similar with similar feeding and appearance and is commonly mistake for them in Oklahoma. The Japanese Beetles are not widespread in Oklahoma and have only been here for a few years in the counties that have them now. There is a regularly updated list of counties and states that have them but I cannot recall the website name right now. I will look for it.

After seeing some (I thought) I contacted the expert at OSU a few years ago and he told me that we very likely did not have them near me at that time. He provided a picture of a nearly identical one that is the one usually mistaken for them here and it turned out that this was exactly what I had. Since then they have turned up in a couple more Oklahoma counties and in larger numbers but still the northeast is the only area confirmed with them in this state according to the official national JB monitoring page.

Scott,

I know the look-alike beetle you're talking about, but I don't know its name. We have them here sometimes and I see them around but I don't ever see them on my garden plants, so I don't know what they're eating---probably some of the native stuff.

We do have a lot of ground beetles here, including some pretty green ones. I like seeing them around.

We are starting to see crane flies and mosquitoes here, so I guess that's another sign of spring.

Dawn

Here, it's hilarious to watch, when those big green beetles start flying around. Our chickens look like they are playing some sort of sport, chasing them all over the place and eating them as if they were potato chips.

George

George,

Same here but it is me and six kids chasing them instead of chickens. We don't eat them, but we swat them with tennis rackets. They really like my young pecan trees near my house and they were thick around them last year.

This the one I thought might be a japanese beetle that was skeletonizing my pecan leaves, but it is another beetle and not a JB:

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Last year we had a big infestation of slender black beetles with orange spots later in the season. They were all over my tomatoes. What are those?

Earthy,

They most likely were blister beetles. There are about 2500 species of blister beetles and they are a common pest on tomato plants (and many, many other plants as well).

I most commonly see the solid black ones or the black and orange striped ones, but they come in a huge assortment of colors including: solid black, solid brown, solid orange, and then black with orange spots, black with orange or red heads, orange with black spots, purplish black, greenish black, black and blue, etc.

They are hard to get rid of but the organic pesticide called Spinosad controls some of the species. I've linked the Blister Beetle section from bugguide.net for you. You may or may not find a blister beetle on those pages that resembles the ones you saw. Bugguide has 52 pages of images of blister beetles.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Images of Blister Beetles at bugguide.net

Holy cow, there are a bunch of varieties. We just made several trips to the garden each day and picked them off. I was adding some well aged (and previously overgrown) compost to new raised beds, and saw lots of grubs, but mostly larger ones. We picked a bunch, but I am sure more went into the gardens. Hopefully there just June bugs. This thread was timely.

i read that 4 o'clocks are loved by japanese beetles and it kills them. i believe it was 4 o'clocks.has anyone tried this and does it work?