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Saturday, April 30, 2011

The Carrot-Trap for Wireworms

You recommended burying carrots or potatoes around the garden as a method to attract and dispose of  wireworms.

It totally works.

I used grocery-store carrots.  I cut them in half, because the ones I had were ridiculously long. I pushed them into the soil at various points around my garden, leaving a "handle" sticking up above the soil.



I left them alone for a week.  It rained a lot during the past week, which encouraged decay.  You had said that wireworms like soft, decaying veggies.   Today I checked them.  The first one I pulled up was riddled with holes and had three writhing wireworms.



I picked them out of the carrot, threw them onto the driveway nearby and stomped on them.  I checked the other buried carrots and did the same thing.

I also now know which part of the garden the wireworms are concentrating.  The carrots in one corner of my largest raised bed were the most ridden with wireworms.  The further away I got from that corner, the fewer worms.  In fact, the carrots in the far opposite corner had no wireworms.  Interesting.  The infested corner is the area where I had my peas and tomatoes last year.  The area of last year's kale and escarole had the fewest wireworms.

Thanks!

2 comments:

  1. Excellent. It's dorky and kind of sad, but I've always sort of hoped someone would get wireworms so that I could recommend this totally cool method.

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  2. Another use for the buried carrots. They also seem to be attracting tiny gray garden slugs indigenous to the northwest.

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