Posts Tagged ‘diatomaceous earth’

Great!  Earwigs.

The good news:  the birds are singing, the flowers are blooming, and things are starting to grow!

The bad news:  it was a rough week for young plants around here.  Between the sudden strong winds (gusting into the 30 mph range, according to the forecast) and an explosion of earwigs, new transplants in beds and seedlings in the greenhouse had a good chance of being throttled.  Luckily, we have only set a few tender plants out (lettuces, and some too-early bush beans just to see).  The other annuals (sugar snap peas, kale, radishes, garlic, and chard) and the perennials (strawberries, blueberries, blackberries) are hardy or established enough to not have been damaged by the wind.

I have never lived anywhere with so many earwigs.  In the greenhouse (unheated, so technically a hoophouse), they  caused a frustrating, but not devastating, amount of damage.  I took swift action, and after three days I’m pretty sure we’ve gotten the upper hand.

The first thing I did was hand-pick (i.e., smash) every individual I could, moving every flat, planter, etc. to get to them.  They move pretty quickly, so quite a few got away.  Next, I used short pieces of left-over lumber (2x4’s and half 2x4’s) to raise all flats up off of the bench tops, removing lots of hiding places.  I tried to keep open space wherever I could.  I also moved the most valuable seedlings, placing them on temporary, dry shelves (and on a wheelbarrow) in the center of the greenhouse.

Finally, I dusted with diatomaceous earth (fossilized remains of diatoms - a type of algae - the hard shells of which create tiny cuts in the insect’s body), which is non-toxic.

Over the course of the past couple of days, I have checked multiple times for earwigs, killing the few that I have seen, and re-applying diatomaceous earth where necessary (e.g., where watering has caused it to wash away).  If over the next couple of weeks we continue to have problems, we’ll add parasitic nematodes to the treatment.