Landscape pests: chinch bugs and borers and scales and…

Lawn

It starts with patches that look like dog urine marks (but …no dog!) which join together. Result: patchy, ugly, dead lawn. The minute you see the phantom dog pee marks, cut both ends off a tin can, pound it into the edge of one of the dead patches, and fill with water. Leave overnight, and check for chinch bugs.

There are quite a few socalled remedies for these voracious little critters, but my recommendation is to call the local Pro-Vert concession (or similar) and they’ll use a natural treatment to get rid of them.

How to get your lawn back in shape? Rake off the thatch in September, topdress, and overseed with an endophytic variety of tall fescue or rye grass. (Many lawn pests are killed by naturally occurring endophytic fungi.) You will probably need to treat again next summer.

Trees

Emerald Ash Borer will make the leaves suddenly disappear from your ash tree. Thank your ash for the good years and move on. Beech scale is suddenly everywhere: scale insects hidden under a round, fuzzy carapace suck at the tree, leaving an entranceway for a fungal infection. Horticultural oils may help, but in our beech-heavy natural forest, control may be difficult. Demise also imminent.

Plants

Hello, Japanese Beetles! Bronze-backed, strangely-shaped beetles that eat and reproduce like alien invaders. Suck them up with a hand-held vacuum, and empty the chamber into a bucket of very soapy water, or use a ShopVac with soapy water in the canister. (Eewww….)

Deer

What would this article be without a rant about deer? By the time this is published, they will be wreaking havoc. I’ll say it again: never mind the ornamentals, the deer are destroying the young trees and understory, and the lower branches of most established evergreens. Watersheds? Watch the video about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone; it says it all.

Why nothing is being done to protect our forests is a mystery to me.

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