Gardening Tips

Do you have a garden? Are some of the plants riddled with holes? This is the doing of Japanese beetles. Japanese beetles are invasive insects that eat the leaves of your garden’s plants, repopulate like crazy, and are just annoying.

Japanese beetles eat everything from milkweed to zinnias; ferns to grapevines; fruit trees to rose bushes.

To make Japanese beetles go away, there are some pesticides to kill them. Some of my friends and I catch and kill Japanese beetles that are eating our and others gardens. There are lots of different kinds of pesticides, some poisonous and harmful, some that are supposedly okay for people, pets, and the earth. You will have to do your own research to see which you want to use, if any. You can also pluck them by hand and kill them, though this is tedious work, and you might not get them all. Japanese beetles are hard to drown, but if you put them in a bucket of water (soapy water is better) they will have a hard time getting out.

Though Japanese beetles eat your plants and are invasive, they are not bad creatures, not that there are any, they just follow their instinct to eat, mate, and repopulate. They did not choose to be here, they did not choose to hatch out of their egg in the U.S.A., they just did.

I read on The Old Farmer’s Almanac about a homemade recipe of a pesticide. The recipe is: Mix 1 teaspoon of liquid dishwashing detergent with 1 cup of vegetable oil and shake well; then add it to 1 quart of water. Add 1 cup of rubbing alcohol and shake vigorously to emulsify. Pour this mixture into a spray bottle and use it at ten-day intervals on pests.

WARNING! Homemade pesticides can be also bad for plants. It is a good idea to test your spray first, you can test it by spraying it on a small part of your plant (part of the leaf, a top small leaf, ect.), wait 24 hours to see if there are any bad reactions, and, if no bad reactions, continue spraying on the rest of the plant.

Apply sprays in the morning, never in full sun or at temperatures above 90ºF. If your plants start to wilt, rinse the leaves immediately with clean water.