Top Ten Pests and Weeds in Northeast - The Street Smart Gardener
Tips, Tricks
Kenny Williams from W&W Nursery tells you the most common pests and weeds you will find in the Northeast. Learn the characteristics of the top ten, including how to prevent and eliminate these pests from your own garden. 'The Street Smart Gardener' is a gardening-based 'why to' web series (webisode) developed for the average gardener. The series is fresh, entertaining, funny, and educational. The creator and host is Kenny Williams, a renowned landscape artist and owner of W&W Nursery in Apalachin, NY. W&W Nursery has been in business for over 20 years and is the largest independent Nursery and Garden Center in New York's Southern Tier. Kenny's unique tips, tricks...and humor... will enlighten and entertain you, no matter how green your thumb. Visit W&W Nursery & Landscape in person at 906 Marshland Road in Apalachin, NY. (607) 687-0305 http://www.wwnursery.com/
Comments
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I also find Japanese beetles tricky to control. This year I planted evening primrose and the Japanese beetles were eating them.
However, I would not recommend using Imidacloprid. Not only is this insecticide non-selective, but it can be very persistent in the environment when it gets into water in the absence of light. I've read that it can persist 1-3 years in the soil. It has also been implicated in colony collapse disorder. There is also significant evidence that it can move offsite in groundwater and harm aquatic vertebrates.
Because of this I would urge you to research this chemical, and to stop using and advocating for it. I would urge you to take this video down until you can edit out this recommendation, because by leaving it up, advocating for the use of this chemical, you may be contributing to ecological harm.
One thing I noticed, this year in my garden, is that there was a host plant that I think was making the Japanese beetle infestation worse. In my case, it was multifloral rose, which is a very nasty invasive weed in my area. This plant grows very vigorously and aggressively, and I've noticed that Japanese beetles have a strong preference for this plant. While this is good in some ways (it helps control the multifloral rose), I think the presence of the rose may be increasing the beetle population, which then turn to other plants, like my evening primrose, once the rose is defoliated. I've grown evening primrose on several other sites where there is no multifloral rose nearby, and I didn't have the same problem with Japanese beetles. This is just one example of how there might be other ways to control Japanese beetles, by carefully observing which plants are supporting them more than others. -
I definitely remove some of these from my garden (including dandelions, common chickweed) but aphids I leave.
If you treat aphids with insecticides, you may not only kill the aphids, but other beneficial insects.
In my experience, I have never seen aphids kill a plant. Whenever the aphid infestation has gotten out of hand, I've always eventually seen something show up to eat the aphids. In the middle of the summer, I often see praying mantises show up to do this. In fall, I've seen flocks of migrating warblers show up and completely eliminate all the aphids from my garden, a few birds can eat all of them in as little as 30 minutes. I worry that by spraying to control the aphids, I might not only be removing a valuable food source for these beneficial predators, but also poisoning them.
If you have a problem with aphids and you aren't having anything show up to eat them, maybe the problem is that your garden isn't supporting enough biodiversity. I've found that when I plant a diversity of native plants in my garden, there are nearly always natural predators of insects in my garden. This year I even started to find toads in my garden.
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