Worms in cherries: how to fight, how to spray cherries for worms

Worms are nematode pests

A serious danger in the countryside is posed by nematodes - tiny worms that are pests of the garden. By infecting plants, they lead to the occurrence of nematode diseases. Plants infected with nematodes lag behind healthy ones in growth, and their leaves curl in warm weather. The root system produces few thin lateral branches, the plant darkens and looks depressed. Hardly visible harmful worms in the soil in the garden (photos and names are indicated) infect many plants.

Small pest worms in the garden gnaw the bases of stems, roots and leaves. It's difficult to fight them. Gray worms are resistant to biological products. To fight them, bait is prepared.

Bran - 1 kg.
Melissa - 0.1 g.
Votexit - 50 g.

Life cycle of nematodes

Plants are attacked by root nematodes and develop within forty days. The specific duration depends on the type of pest.

What to do when centipedes appear in an apartment and is it worth fighting them? Read useful information.
Read about how to get rid of wasps in a wooden house and how to detect an insect nest at this address.

The life cycle flows in two directions:

When laying eggs, the female is in the ground and not in the plant; the larvae settle in the soil. The pests begin to move until they reach the root system of the plant. This situation occurs during the primary infection of a garden plot;
in the second case, the female is in the roots of the plants and lays eggs there. The larvae move short distances and immediately actively feed on juices. It is more difficult to cope with such a lesion; biological methods are not suitable; the use of insecticides is necessary.

Worms in the garden - we breed them ourselves.

In order to saturate your garden plot with free soil disintegrants, you should start with the simplest thing - prepare a wooden box or dig a small square hole in the garden

Fill it with leaves, soil, waste paper and pour a small layer of slop on top of everything.
The whole thing should stand for a week so that the contents are thoroughly soaked.
Then place several earthworms on the surface: 2-3 will be enough to get “large offspring” in the future.
Water with settled or rain water from a watering can - tap water can kill small individuals.

Now you know how to breed worms in the garden, but there are a few more points that may be useful in this process:

It is advisable to loosen it about twice a week to saturate all layers with oxygen.
Monitor the health of your “pets”: if they are active and clean, have a pinkish tint, then everything is going as it should.
Otherwise, bait is required in the form of: tea leaves, potato peels, even bread crumbs will do. It is usually administered weekly, in small portions (in layers of a couple of centimeters).

To remove all the worms without using your hands, this may seem like a nasty process to some, let them starve for several days, then put some food somewhere - they will all get out of the processed vermicompost on their own.

What are these white worms in an indoor flower?

Fly larvae;
Nematodes;
Enhythrea;
Fungus gnat larvae (sciarids);

Fly larvae, sciarids

up to 4 mm in length, white. Adult hatchlings have wings. They reproduce equally in moist and dry soil - they are more attracted to the environment in the room where they are comfortable.

Since most of the midges and worms are in indoor flowers, we will dry the soil mixture to kill the pests.

How to remove white worms from an indoor flower:

Stop watering the plant;
Fill in expanded clay, dry hydrogel, beads - it prevents stagnation of water and prevents the laying of larvae;
To catch and poison midges - spread sticky tape over the pot and spray the midges with dichlorvos (attention: ventilate the room before sleeping);
Mix wood ash + tobacco shavings into the soil;
Clean the sulfur from the match head;

The listed methods will help kill white worms in indoor flowers, but if there are too many of them, you will have to use chemicals.

How to treat flowers against white worms:

"Aktara";
"Bazudin";
"Agravertine";
"Fitoverm";
Anti-worm medications;

Soil treatment against white worms in flowers

The soil mixture is steamed or spilled with a solution of potassium permanganate before use. Try not to over-moisten the soil in the pot, lower the humidity and air temperature to a level comfortable for indoor flowers. Carry out insecticide prevention once a year.

Larvae in compost. Difference between the larvae of the mole cricket and the larvae of the cockchafer and the larvae of the bronze beetle. What do mole cricket larvae look like? What larvae produce compost?

Many gardeners, shoveling compost, come across fat, white larvae; such larvae are also often found under mulch in garden beds. People, due to their natural disgust, fear or illiteracy, attribute everything to the harmfulness of these larvae, it happens that panic begins, and without understanding they make the most incredible assumptions and often exterminate everyone indiscriminately.

Last year, in an article, I talked about the larvae of the bronze beetle and showed the difference between the larvae of the bronze beetle and the larvae of the cockchafer. Detailed article “How to distinguish a bronze beetle larva from a cockchafer larva” -

At the end of the article, I promised subscribers to take a photo of the compost produced by the larvae of the bronze beetle. It's time to fulfill the promise.

Read also: Can a mouse hurt itself?

To begin with, I will repeat myself and briefly tell new readers of the site what these “animals” are, and also tell you about my new experience.

Briefly about larvae in compost and under mulch. Bronze larvae, living in compost and under mulch, feed only on dead organic matter, that is, the mulch itself or the compost itself. By feeding on plant debris, they produce excellent quality compost for you in a compost heap, or they do the same thing, but in the garden, eating mulch. These larvae increase the fertility of YOUR EARTH.

Bronze beetle larva.

A mother bronze knows what her babies will need for nutrition, so she lays her eggs in compost (preferring grass and leaf compost) or in mulched beds.

Under the mulch you will find bronze larvae.

Very similar larvae that you will find in weeded beds without mulch are the larvae of the cockchafer or chafer.

Larva of the May beetle or beetle.

These larvae will not increase the fertility of your land; they will try to leave you without a harvest. These larvae eat plant roots. Therefore, we look at where we found the larvae.

The mother cockchafer will not dig into mulch or compost; she will lay her eggs where plant roots are accessible to her children. She will lay her eggs in a perfect (beautiful, weeded) garden. (By the way, an ideal garden is a relative concept.)

In such “beautiful” beds you will find the larva of the cockchafer.

If you are not a subscriber, but are reading this article, then I think that you have few or no moles. (A lot is a little, this is also a relative concept, depending on what you compare with).

This is understandable, because the mole eats everything in the ground that moves! If you decide to engage in natural farming and use “Active Mulch” - in order to obtain large and environmentally friendly harvests, then the number of moles you will have will grow exponentially, you must be prepared for this. After all, mulch is also processed by earthworms, and worms are the main mole “yummy”.

Earthworms, various larvae (mole cricket larvae included) are included in the mole’s diet, you don’t know which is worse!

Yes, what can I say. I myself didn’t know that such larvae existed while moles ruled our garden, but after a long war with moles, we found effective protection against moles -. Moles no longer bother us, but the number of bronco larvae is growing every year.

To avoid confusion, here is a photo of two larvae. Compare.

On the left is a cockchafer larva. On the right is a bronze larva.

The chafer larva differs from the bronze beetle by its large head, strong jaws, thinner waist, and this fashion model is long-legged.

But still, in the fall, you can find cockchafer larvae under the mulch! How did they get there? To answer this question, try to remember at what time you mulched the bed?! You waited for the potatoes to sprout, then you hilled them up, then you hilled them up again, and mulched them when the tops of the potatoes were already 40-50 cm. What month was it? And in what month does the mass flight of cockchafers begin?

Here is the answer to the question: while you were hilling the potatoes, the cockchafer managed to lay eggs, and the mulch that you put on top will not prevent its larvae from eating the tubers! What's the conclusion? Do not delay with mulching, especially since hilling up the sprouted potatoes

will not increase your yield!

The quality of the compost is not very visible in the photo; I filmed it in the video below.

Bronze larvae process organic matter and produce compost.

I want to say that two-thirds of this compost consists of apple litter. The apples were ours and our neighbors'. Of course, I didn’t dump a cubic meter of apples into one pile. I collected the fallow every other day, it turned out 4-6 buckets, laid them out in one to one and a half layers, and sprinkled them with sawdust (2-3 buckets), leaves, which I always prepare in the fall (10-15cm), earth (2 buckets), ash, various organic waste that neighbors throw into the forest. Also, waste apples after the production of apple juice were placed in a pile, and there was also a lot of them; more than 100 liters of juice were made. The pile rose and sank.

In the late autumn of 2015, when we were transferring the compost (“Compost in Winter”), we poured larvae into the middle of the “Apple Heap”; I wrote about this last year. The larvae survived the winter normally, and over the summer they ate all the apples. And in the fall of 2021, I took a photo of the compost and made a video.

I mainly use this compost for growing early tomato seedlings, containers for seedlings are 5-8 liters. “Tomato harvest on June 15 in the Moscow region.” — I grow seedlings not only for myself, but also for sale, upon request. If the compost remains, then for growing potatoes “100 kg of potatoes per 5 sq.m.” — .

If you find larvae of different sizes in the compost, this does not mean at all that the larvae of different beetles are in front of you. Bronzewort lays eggs in the compost all summer, and the larvae hatch from the eggs at different times, respectively, small larvae are “preschoolers”, and large ones are “high school students”. It wouldn’t even occur to us to call a chicken a sparrow because it’s small!

The photo shows that the bronze larvae are of different sizes.

The larvae live for about a year and a half, the further stage of development is the pupa, and from the pupa an adult beetle.

«Quick preparation of compost. Compost is made in one season by larvae" -

From Wikipedia:

“...The adult beetle feeds on the flowers of wild and cultivated plants, including fruit trees. Despite this, beetles are not capable of seriously harming gardening.” It is often written that the beetle eats the stamens of flowers and does not set fruit on the trees. This may be true, but I didn’t notice any harm from the beetles.

Mole crickets are very rare in our country; they are mostly brought in with manure. When people find larvae in compost or in a garden bed, they first assume that they are mole cricket larvae.

The mole cricket loves to live in compost, which is made from manure, so when buying manure, remember that along with the manure you can buy a mole cricket or its eggs, completely free of charge. In addition, the mole cricket has wings, and there is no way to insure your garden against her visits. Everyone knows what a bear looks like.

The mole cricket is very rare in our country, apparently our climate (Moscow region) is too cool for it, so to find a photo of the mole cricket larvae, I decided to use the Internet. To my surprise, many sites give completely incorrect information; the authors of the articles show photos of bronze beetle larvae and cockchafer larvae, while claiming that these are mole cricket larvae. Let's open Wikipedia:

“…. The female mole cricket makes a nest at a shallow depth in the ground, the dome-shaped arch of which usually rises somewhat above the surface of the earth - to ensure better heating of the masonry by the sun's rays.

There are hundreds of eggs in the clutch, from which larvae emerge with a body shape resembling an adult, only much lighter.

The larvae grow for several years, the nymphs have visible rudiments of wings...”

The larvae have a body shape similar to the adult!

And on many sites we are offered pictures in which the larvae resemble a thick, white worm!

Let's try to get to the bottom of the truth. Mole cricket eggs look like this:

And here is the owner of the nest herself. Photo artist Stanislav Shinkarenko shared this photo with us.

How often gardeners are in for an unpleasant surprise! We had just planted seedlings of tomatoes and cabbage, the seedlings had already begun to grow, cucumbers began to grow, and suddenly, here and there the plants withered and fell as if they had been cut down. What is the reason?

Where do worms come from in berries?

Cherries are the first berries to ripen in orchards.
It is eaten both fresh and in canned form. The main enemy of cherries is the cherry fly. She lays her larvae in the pulp of the berry. The cherry fly is 3-5 mm long. It feeds on waste products of cherry aphids. After saturation, the flies begin to lay eggs. The masonry is made in green, unripe fruits of cherries or cherries. On a note! Oviposition of flies is carried out in sunny weather, at a temperature of +18 oC.

Adults live 45 days and die after laying eggs. A week later, white worms, 0.5 cm long, appear. Eating the pulp lasts 16-20 days. After this, the parasite climbs out, reaching a length of 6-8 mm and:

The pupation process begins.
The pupa appears in early June.
To complete the life cycle, negative temperatures are required. For this reason, they go under the snow cover for the winter.

Damaged cherries become soft and darken. The taste of the fruit also deteriorates. They turn into pupae the following year in April-May. Most often, the pupae fly out of the pulp before the berries fall. Interestingly, the appearance of flies can be tracked by the blooming of the acacia tree. White acacia - Robinia - is considered common. When the first shoots appear, you can expect the arrival of flies.

Fighting mole crickets in the garden

The first and most famous garden pest is the mole cricket - a fairly large insect that leads a mainly underground lifestyle.

Since I started gardening, I have almost thoroughly studied the habits of the common mole cricket. At first I didn’t want to believe that she was on my site, then there was a phase of despair and wild horror, from the fact that I met her nose to nose and was finally convinced that it was she—a bear! Now - I just know that it exists, and let it live, you can’t argue with nature. The disappearance of one species entails other, sometimes unpredictable consequences.

The common mole cricket is widespread throughout the European part of Russia. The natural habitats of the mole cricket are the banks of rivers and streams. She prefers moist, loose soil. In her gardens she prefers planting cabbage, compost heaps, and manure, especially horse manure.

Its presence on the site can be determined not only by cut plants. At the beginning of summer, especially after watering in the morning, winding, dug-up areas of soil are clearly visible in the beds. These are the surface passages of the mole cricket. It is difficult to predict where it will crawl tomorrow. Running after her with a ladle of some kind of nasty stuff doesn’t bring any pleasure either. Some gardeners sit at night, watch when the mole cricket comes to the surface in order to destroy it. Some gardeners buried three-liter jars of water in the path of mole crickets so that they would fall in and not be able to get out. I remember how I laughed when I read somewhere that you can fight mole crickets if you drive aspen stakes throughout the garden.

I tried planting seedlings in cut-off plastic bottles. But she refused it. The tomatoes have grown well, but the cabbage grew very poorly in these cut-off bottles. While weeding, slightly touching the edges of the bottles, my cabbages flew out of the ground. There was no way they could catch the edge of the root in the ground.

In order not to increase the number of mole crickets in a particular area, I advise you to get rid of boards and logs - buried or lying on the ground. Also make sure that the water containers do not leak. Try not to bring manure from unknown places where there may be a concentration of mole crickets. If you just need to purchase manure or humus, try not to put it on the ground, isolate it from the ground so that the mole crickets do not crawl around the garden. Prepare a special container. In such a container you can spill all the humus or manure with pest control drugs. Also isolate compost heaps from contact with the ground.

What to do with the beds where the mole cricket operates? At the beginning of summer, in June, the mole cricket looks for a warm, sunny place to build a nest and lay eggs. The nest protrudes somewhat from the ground and resembles an ordinary hummock. The only unusual thing is that nothing grows next to this hummock within a radius of 20-30 cm. It is around its nest that the mole cricket cuts down all the grass or other plants so that they do not shade the nest. The mole cricket often comes to its nest and checks if everything is in order. Having destroyed the hummock-nest, you can see many gray-yellow eggs slightly smaller than a pea. This is the clutch of a mole cricket. This is exactly how my meeting with the mole cricket happened: I was looking at a clutch of eggs, and she also came to visit them. My legs were paralyzed from horror and numbness, and when she saw me, she quietly began to back away, covering herself with her claw. How scary she is! The only thing I want is to never meet her again. So, the conclusion suggests itself: loosen the soil more often and do not neglect deep autumn and spring digging.

One of the effective ways to combat mole crickets is the insecticide preparations Medvetox, Thunder or another drug designed to combat mole crickets and available for sale in your city. It must be used according to the instructions. I’ll tell you right away that it helps. In addition, when planting seedlings, I add crushed eggshells to the holes, which I collect all year.

I also read that you can sprinkle sawdust around the perimeter of the bed and deepen it a little. But I haven’t done it myself, so I can’t recommend it.

My helpers in the fight against mole crickets are cats. As soon as we started living with two cats and a female cat, I noticed that all my plants stayed in place. In the summer, my cats generally catch everything that moves: flies, butterflies, grasshoppers, crickets, caterpillars.

And if the mole cricket moves to the trees, good luck: let it continue to roam the expanses of its native area, improving soil aeration.

If the mole cricket really annoys you, then in the fall, when everything is cleared from the garden and frosts have already begun on the soil, dig several holes up to 50 cm deep, cover it with film and put manure in it. These are traps into which mole crickets must crawl for the winter. Check the holes every morning, at this time mole crickets are slow and easy to destroy. In my opinion, this is the most realistic way to fight mole crickets.