Lawn Pests
Ants
These are more unsightly than a problem really; you can easily deal with them with a variety of methods ranging from using borax and sugar near the nest to commercial ant killers. I prefer to just brush over the nest distributing the eggs and soil and the blackbirds and thrushes seems to clear it up. If they are disturbed enough they tend to move on optimistically to my neighbour’s garden! I read somewhere about clove oil diluted with water and sprinkled onto the nest can cause mass dispersal of the colony. I haven’t tried it but if you do please let me know if it works won’t you.
Tawny Mining Bees
These are smashing solitary little creatures and really not a problem in well kept lawns. At my last home I inherited a rather dry lawn with these little creatures in. The females make little burrows into the dry soil with small mounds and hang around for maybe 7-14 days in the spring. During this time they lay their eggs and then leave, the next generation develop and then leave too. You can have this occurring yearly and personally I left them alone to get on with it the last thing I want to do is rid the world of a small group of bees. Plus if you look on the bonus side they are aerating your lawn for you.
The Chafer beetle (May Bug) also known as:-
Welsh chafer
Summer chafer
Brown chafer
Garden chafer
Rose chafer
Cockchafer
All these beetles have nasty little grubs that have a penchant for your lawns and can cause quite a bit of damage leaving patches of brown where these grubs have happily chewed their way through the roots of your prized lawn. You can spot that you have a problem with both these grubs and leatherjackets when you spots lots of starlings digging around in your lawn. Whilst they may also be helping as aerators for your lawn they could also be trying to tell you that there is a real bug problem.
Solution - Unless you have the time and are prepared to cover the lawn area with black plastic and go out early in the morning to slowly peel it back to pick off all the grubs (and you will find leather jackets there as well) you may well choose to use insect against insect with the Nemasys chafer grub killer ( Heterorhabditis megidis) . The parasitic nematodes seek out the Chafer and Leatherjacket larvae and destroy them. The best time to treat them is during August – September as they need warm soil temperatures and moist conditions so you may need to water your lawn. Other options include a chafer trap which works with a pheromone attractant. Finally there are chemical treatments which you can water in the lawn which are obviously not so environmentally friendly.
Daddy Long Leg grubs otherwise known as Leatherjackets
These are a similar problem to the Chafer beetle mentioned above and are treated in the same way. These larval grubs also enjoy lush lawn roots to munch on and can be a real pain if not stopped.
Moles
Now this really is a nightmare if you have carefully spent months creating this beautiful area of green. This luscious view out of your window to be admired and appreciated and then bang one morning you wake up to see devastation.
Those pesky critters just don’t care, straight across the lawn leaving piles of mud in their wake.
Solution – well there are a variety of nasty traps out there with names like the scissor mole trap or choker, but I just don’t like them even if they are other humane ones. I couldn’t go and release a mole elsewhere to destroy someone else’s carefully tended lawn. However as I don’t like my next door neighbour or their wretched dog I really don’t have much of a problem with using a sonic mole repellent which eventually seems to have done the trick and they are now off burrowing merrily through their lawn.
There are a variety of solutions out there such as smoke bombs, mole repellent lawn treatments as well as solar and battery powered repellers. A friend of mine had the same problem a last year early in the spring and deployed the old jeyes fluid 1:20 mix to the run and as they have a good sense of smell they didn’t appreciate that and moved on. I would appreciate your feed back on what works for you so if you want to leave me a message please do.
