WEEKEND GARDEN BLOGGING

Well, there are good bugs, and there are bad bugs, to paraphrase Camper Van Beethoven. And the bad bugs mounted a surge in our garden while we were away these past few weeks. Japanese beetles have ravaged our roses, cherry trees, hazelnuts, wisteria, and porcelain vine, leaving ghostly skeletonized leaves waving woefully.

This Asian invasion’s been the bane of gardeners ever since Japanese beetle larvae apparently snuck into New Jersey in a shipment of iris bulbs sometime before 1912, when we started inspecting imports.

The beetles aren’t much of a problem in their native Japan, where a natural predator, the winsomely named winsome fly, keeps them in check. But here in the U.S., the Japanese beetle is a pervasive pest with few enemies and one very big best friend: the ubiquitous American lawn. Japanese beetle grubs thrive on grass roots, so wherever there are lawns, you’ll find these copper-colored creeps decimating your greenery.

The old-school way to deal with Japanese beetles relied on pherome-scented traps which employed the same strategy that Donald Rumsfeld tried in Iraq—luring every beetle in the region to descend on your yard so you could do battle with them. Interestingly, gardeners found this method totally counter-productive, and now prefer to wage biological warfare by applying a bacterium called milky spore to their soil.

Our neighbors whose lawn laid out a welcome mat for these pesky beetles have, thankfully, saturated their grass with milky spore, but it may take several years for the bacterium to become established and destroy the evil-doers. In the meantime, our foliage falls victim to these voracious invaders, and we find ourselves tempted to commit Spectracide.