A lawn care customer called about small insects buzzing around his head last evening at dusk near his tree. He said they were the size of his baby finger. Told him to check google images for European chafer. The European chafer is a foreign import that looks like our Canadian June bug. It is a little smaller, but for all intents it looks the same. Unless you had both the European chafer and a June beetle side by side- you probably couldn't tell the difference.
Sure enough, that's the adults on their mating flights getting ready to lay eggs that hatch into white grubs.
#lawncare
Prepare to apply nematodes to help reduce damage from grubs.
Good morning Gerry.
I have for 4 years BIRCH TREE and now tree has Birch Leafminer . Last year myself tried to fight it, but now it has become higher. Can you help me?
Hi Svetlana, currently there is no easy solution for the caterpillars of the Birch Leaf Miner once they have gotten into the leaf. They are inside the leaf between the upper and lower surface. Normal insecticides do not penetrate the leaf surface to reach the insects.
In our lawn care library, we talk about aeration and overseeding to repair damaged lawns.
In a blog post, we again give some ideas on what is involved with aerating and overseeding.
But a picture is always worth a thousand words.
Here is one lawn where we remembered to take an before photo.
The before photos were taken in late April.
The lawn was aerated and overseeded on May 22.
The lawn was also fertilized with our Turf King fertilizer on May 24th
The after photos were taken on June 19th- 4 weeks after the seeding. The customer here is pleased and said that he was very careful to water twice a day for the first 2 weeks as we recommended.
While the lawn is far from perfect, the grass is well established. The weeds did jump in to the bare spots, but this is to be expected. When the lawn is thin or bare, weed seed in the soil will now have the opportunity to grow and they will.
As the grass gets better established, we will work on the weeds.
Many of the weeds are not weeds that normally grow in a well cared for lawn. A thick lawn will squeeze out many of these weeds. Some of the weeds are also weeds that will not tolerate regular mowing. They will grow in the bare spots but as the lawn starts getting mowed regularly, they will disappear.
