Many people have asked me why their lawns are brown. Today’s answer may blow you away.
Storms coming from the south hit Ohio in 2021. These storm’s paths were unusual.
Moths took this flight from Oklahoma in the storms. These storms caused the invasion of Fall Armyworms and their devastation.
The caterpillars or larvae of the Armyworm or the (Spodoptera frugiperda) tear into a lawn’s roots for 14 to 30 days.
There can be up to 1,500 eggs hatching out all at the same time from one female that can destroy lawns within 48 hours. Reaction time for this quick nemesis can leave us falling behind.
The Fall Armyworm, in Van Wert, had 826 in the traps last year that OSU Extension agents placed.
Imagine if all these 826 captured in the Van Wert traps escaped to reproduce the devastation, they level against a lawn?
Pictured above is a Fall Armyworm predator and parasite ichneumon wasp. Photo by Eric Larson.
That would be 1,500 eggs for each female, or 1.239 million potential little soldiers sent with the specific purpose of destroying our lawn.
I talked with Curtis Young, extension agent for Van Wert, last week.
He eased my concerns about the recent storms this year. Young had not yet set the traps for this season.
“I will set the traps (the first week in August),” he said. “Pheromone traps are used to attract Fall Armyworm and have proven helpful in predicting Fall Armyworm infestation.”
One of our struggles is that Armyworms are nocturnal creatures. Identification during the night is at best difficult.
We can see these larvae during the day if we get a few buckets of water and soap poured over a brown patch in a lawn. They will try to escape to the surface of the lawn.
I was able to identify the Armyworm in the lawn by doing this in the morning. The lawn looked dead. We shall see a few green blades of grass as we inspect the lawn.
There are six beneficial organisms that we can purchase to help with the battle against Fall Armyworms. A parasitic nematode feeds on our nemesis, the Fall Armyworm, and other lawn pests and will dispatch them in short order.
Once we release this soil-dwelling nematode, it tracks the Armyworm and eats it.
What we need to know is that the only item on their menu is the pest, not our plants or us.
Ichneumon and Trichogramma wasps both prey on Armyworms by laying eggs on them, allowing their larvae to feed on the moth. Ladybugs, Praying Mantis, and Minute Pirate Bugs and the wasps previously mentioned can be purchased to control Fall Armyworms.
Fall Armyworm is on the menu of all five of these insects. By regularly providing food, we can keep these beneficial predators in our gardens to manage various insect pests.
The title for this column points to scouting our gardens for the challenges that appear.
Minor problems that are dealt with as they occur don’t reach significant levels if you deal with them quickly. Fall Armyworm lays cottony little clumps on the underside of the leaves, which may be an egg cluster of Fall Armyworms.
If you find the eggs as you stroll through your garden, you can correct destroy the insect early and not have a brown lawn.
Neem oil is a natural and utterly safe compound that people use to kill and deter this pest and many more.
Combine two tablespoons of Neem oil, two tablespoons of liquid soap, and one gallon of water. We can apply this mixture as a spray to all of our plants, and the dish soap will cause the Neem oil to stick to the plants.
Spinosad is an insect nerve agent and will cause their bodies to twitch and go into paralysis. In one to two days, Spinosad will have worked.
Follow the labeled directions for both compounds.
After pouring the water over the brown patches in our lawn, we can use this homemade Fall Armyworm killer. Four cloves of garlic, two hot peppers, steeped in two cups of water overnight.
Strain the ingredients through a colander. Mix a teaspoon of dish soap as a sticker and spray this mix over the moth.
I hope that we can all look at all these solutions for brown lawns and find one that works for your lawn. And quoting my hero, Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
If you have a chance to stroll through your garden this week and see a challenge, let me know at ericlarson546@yahoo.com.
Comments are closed.