You know, if I have to go preventative instead of waiting for strikes, I may just use that combo.
I’m hoping I have been killing off the PC here and they’ll be less of a problem. They were free to hit the wild fruits for generations, so they aren’t used to being poisoned!
I’m meticulous about picking up fruit that has dropped with eggs/larvae inside.
I love the saying a Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Its sadly usually the best way to go with the natural route and i very much love the idea that Im helping grow bugs that will eat the other bugs. I am hoping here in Colorado we get a lot of people on board for trapping applying beneficial nematodes, BTG and milky spore to combat the JB’s and Emerald Ash borers.
If the manufacturers would change the packaging into something that recycles more easily then we, the consumers would be happy to oblige. The one thing is glass bottles. If the manufacturers went back to glass milk jugs and glass drink bottles we would recycle it. There are some states that put a fee on the bottle to have more incentive to bring it back to recycle it. Remember back some years back when pop bottles would have a fee attached to them? As a kid I always on the lookout for glass pop bottles to get money at the stores to buy candy with.
What insects eat the Emerald Ash borer?
Not insects bacteria, they eat them alive removing the chitin from their exoskeletons
I tried Milky Spore for Japanese beetles and was not impressed. So I tried the BT bacteria strain that will eat chitin off any beetle or grub, and in 2 years the Japanese beetles were gone. Very impressive. To keep them in the yard I used chitin rich crab shells, sold as fertilizer. I spread it all over to feed them. As Richard mentions, I think it is BTG bacteria. Use the version of BTG that is for grubs. That is what worked long run. All the grubs were killed, no beetles! Gardens Alive used to sell it. It won’t work on the ash borer, well the kind you use for adult insects would. But you would need to expose them to the bacteria.
I have a cottage on a small island about 1.5 miles by 0.5 miles. By 2009 the ash borer was all over the island. We had to remove 90 ash trees on this small island. Terrible! Some were huge! Like this one the borers took out. Photo from 2009. That’s a lot of baseball bats! I can say it’s excellent firewood. It took years to burn all I got from the tree trimmers.
Drew explained the BTG and Milky Spore very well and beneficial nematodes eat and lay eggs inside the grubs.
We need to teach the birds how delicious the japanese beetles and emerald ash borers are supposedly in japan they get hit by birds hard!
The Japanese beetle must taste horrible to birds. We had the worst year for Japanese beetles last year. Normally I use only about 6 bags in a season. Last year it was 14 bags completely FULL of Japanese beetles. There are plenty of birds on my property. The Japanese beetles were so thick you could grab a handful of them just by grabbing the tree leaves.
Birds need to see other birds eat things before they start eating them usually and then there is large amounts of learned behavior on there adaption to food. If you save young birds you use your finger to peck where the food is to teach them what is food.
has about 200mi. to go before it gets here. hopefully our cold keeps them away but i doubt it!
I used that stuff to treat for termites around the house. It’s supposed to be effective for 5 years. since then I kind if cringe when I see flowers next to the house and especially anything eatable.
Are you using the pheromone traps and bags? If so, I’d encourage you to stop. I thought that was the way to beat Japanese beetles when they first came out but I learned all they did was attract more and more. The “best” way to use those pheromone traps/bags is to give them to “friends” and neighbors you don’t like that much.
Once I stopped using them, I had many fewer beetles around.
Oh man…sad to see such fine wood burned up in a fireplace! That could have made some excellent furniture/tables/floors/etc…
I think @alan 's point was more from the side of demand driving production, which in an of itself requires large resource inputs. Even if you are recycling, you’re still expending lots of resources: energy, man-hours, chemicals, water, etc…
I’m unfamiliar with this specific plastic, but I’m not sure this is as big of a breakthrough as it’s made out to be. From a real-world implementation standpoint, the biggest challenge for recycling (in the US), is the logistical requirements to collect, sort, and clean. It’s not the cost to melt it down or reform it which is what this new plastic basically was created for (ease of production). We live in large swathes of open land, and even in most of cities (LA), we have less density than cities like Tokyo. This makes transportation costs a nightmare.
Styrofoam recycling is almost completely nonexistant, even though from a process standpoint it’s straightforward. It’s low volume density means that an entire truckload translates into a small yield. Lightweight plastics aren’t much better. This is why most towns and cities have completely abandoned styrofoam recycling and often recycling completely (recently like Philadelphia) and resort to burning now that China isn’t taking bulk recycling shipments anymore.
Perhaps that is the answer. However, when I did not use them the fruit tree leaves, especially my peach trees, were covered with the Japanese beetles. I spayed them and the leaves with Sevin and they seemed to come back anyway. Not sure what the answer is. I have my orchard on about three acres so I do not see a way to control them unless I use something on the ground YET if my neighbors do not I get their beetles.
sad. last summer, the EAB was discovered in Maine for the 1st. time here in my town. year before they were discovered across the border in Edmunston, NB Canada. we have a lot of ash here in wet areas. used for traditional canoe gunnels and snow shoes. also makes fine hardwood veneer for furniture. big trees like that are very valuable if sold to the right place. state just issued a ban on moving ash in state as well as out.
Yes, but I must confess the tree would have never made it to the marketplace. It’s on an island that has no cars. You have to lease a car ferry to go there. The expense of harvesting the tree is too overwhelming to even consider. It was destined for firewood EAB or not. Our biggest trees get to about 120 feet tall. Mostly oaks and maples. Also not tall but very wide are willows. I left a base of a fallen oak to rot because it was too much work to cut up. My biggest saw died, so only have small chain saws right now. I’m not buying another. I’m getting too old to handle them.
I know what you mean. When my very long barred and powerful Sachs Dolmer lost the function of its chain break, I sold it to a stronger and more reckless man than myself. I couldn’t kill that lumber-jack saw- it always started right up and still does so, even after sitting for many months. That’s common for newer equipment but this saw is from the '80’s.
Around here most use Husqvarna saws, expensive! Nice saws though. I have a couple saws people didn’t need anymore and gave me. One is a STIHL and the other is a Sears model. Both work, I have parts to a lot of saws. I have three chains that will fit the STIHL. I hand sharpen the chains about 3-5 times, then I have them sharpened on a machine. One tends to sharpen the sides unevenly, and so the saw drifts to the right or left, so I get them balanced when machine sharpened. One of my best friends has a machine, I take them over there. Usually I wait till all chains need machine sharpening. One chain is rather worn, I should probably pitch it.
I have a couple extra bars too, I keep them from old saws as once in awhile a bar is bent. I bent one when the tree shifted.
This year is the first year in some time I don’t have a tree down on the property, it’s early yet though 
Yeah…its very tough dealing with big trees. Most city trees end up getting turned into firewood, even though i bet a lot of it would make excellent end products. There is a Youtube guy by the name of Matt Cremona that harvests a lot of trees in Minneapolis area and turns them into beautiful creations. The guy is an amazing woodworker…but he has a trailer, chainsaws, and a huge electric bandsaw mill that he can cut the wood up into huge boards.
Still seeing huge ash trees around my neighborhood that need a chainsaw. Completely dead.
