At Bean Blossom Creek, we have suffered the effects of masses of Japanese beetles attacking our gardens for years.  Most years buckets of carbaryl have been sprayed on the flower gardens to try to fight back the invasion.  This past Christmas Julie received a couple of the Bonide Beetle Bagger Japanese Beetle Traps.  After seeing the first beetles, she placed two traps in the lower branches of maple trees hundreds of feet away from the gardens.


The traps were out of sight and out of mind,  I had not even seen where they were hung.  I week later Julie asked me what was different about the grapes? They have not been skeletonized and we haven't seen many beetles in the normal places such as the roses and grapes.

Julie has monitored the traps and saw that the collection bags have become filled with beetles.   We took the bags off the traps and replaced them with new bags yesterday.  The bags are an opaque green, but they are transparent enough that dead beetles can be seen in the bottom and live beetles are in the top of the lower section of the hour glass shaped bags.  One of the two bags was filled and new beetles could not enter.  Maggots were visible working on eating the dead beetles in the bags.  Trying to empty and reuse the bags may be a stinky activity. They bags smell like rotting trash

Will these two traps control the Japanese beetles all season? Will the scent lures degrade over the course of the season? we don't know yet, but so far the beetle pressure is low.

Garlic that was planted in October of 2016 was ready to be harvested this week.  These plants took up a space of about 10 x 10 feet in the garden.  That space will be made ready to have a crop of Fall lettuce planted.  That corner of the garden was the site of my original compost pile.  The ground is very crumbly and rich.