Has anyone found a solution? This is my 3rd year gardening. Planted everything the last few days and woke up this morning and these had chewed off all the stems of the zucchini and completely eaten some cucumber. Not sure how to proceed. I can plant more seeds but fear that these would just eat them again.
by Legal_Concentrate807
14 Comments
For context this is in a raised bed. Reading online they eat decaying matter only, and I have a bunch of sticks a few feet under raised bed.
Diatomaceous earth will help keep them off the plants. Sprinkle it around the stem.
Beer traps and plant out larger starts. I tried using recycled cans as collars last year which kind of helped but not always and they got really rusty.
Diatomaceous Earth.
Those little dicks definitely eat living plant material when they have a population explosion.
I mulched my entire backyard with ground up Christmas trees and the next season I couldn’t direct seed or transplant anything I had to use grow bags that year and the next. After 2 years the mulch thinned out enough that there were fewer rolly polloys
They love leaf litter and hiding places. So start moving some of it elsewhere. Gather up all you can and drop them in soapy water. Don’t worry, there are more! They also love beans and I have problems with them eating my baby bean plants!
You can take a big plastic pop bottle and cut off the top and bottom and surround the plants with it. Clear away any debris around the base. Shove the bottle down an inch or more in the soil.
Now set a trap! Take a small, slightly dirty cat food tin (or similar bowl or tin! I’ve used deep lids in a pinch from peanut butter jars) and put a half inch of olive oil in it. Dig it into the soil a bit a few inches from your plants – the top edge should be level with your soil. Set up a few. I sometimes put a little stick or piece of mulch to help lead them to the oil, like a little ramp of doom!
I had this issue last year. Only thing that helped was using the cardboard from toilet paper rolls around the base of the plant. Make sure the cardboard is about an inch into the soil. This really seemed to help me. I’ve also heard of cutting an orange in half and putting it face down near the plant. The rolli’s should go to it so that you can remove them. I never tried the orange thing though.
Ugh. They ate all 10 of my marigold transplants 🙁 I’ve noticed they prefer to eat whatever leaves are touching the ground. I started pulling off ugly leaves and leaving them on the mulch in offering. They have spared my other plants for now.
This is very strange to me. I have never seen them eat living plant, always hit dead plant matter and frankly I usually encourage them bcus it keeps beds clean and decaying. But here they are plain as day killing your zucchini lol
I don’t know what you can do either. Maybe get rid of any nearby leaf litter that they use as cover
They killed 2 of mine – put diatomaceous earth around and they won’t touch it. I have also successfully put out beer traps last year … unfortunately then raccoons came and that was a whole new problem.
I usually put DE around all young plants in my raised beds. The rollies are vicious.
If anybody here needs help with pillbugs (rolly polly’s) i can help, just send a message to me or something and i will gladly give advise.
Sluggo Plus
You may want to setup a birdhouse and bird feeders nearby. If you attract birds to your garden, they’ll help with the pest pressure.
>Has anyone found a solution?
Rolly Pollys like cover and they like moisture. Mulch provides both of these and helps to explode the rolly polly population. Remove all the wood chips / mulch from the area until the plant is more mature. You want all that ground around the plant to just be bare dirt. The Rolly Pollys will have to cross a large section of open bare ground in order to get to your plant, which they won’t like — being exposed to predators like birds etc in plain sight.
Once the plant is strong enough to survive the bug onslaught, then you can put the mulch back to serve its purpose. Temporarily (~2 weeks?) removing all the organic matter / mulch from the area will likely mean more frequent watering is needed, but that’s a small price to pay for do-it-yourself no-products-needed organic gardening