posted 3 years ago
My worst enemies for 11 years now have been freaking pill bugs! I had grown and created food in high desert country where there was no food before and the damned bugs found it immediately and turned it into a smorgasbord! And then they procreated like crazy and made my life a living hell!!! For 11 years now!
8-10 years ago I tried everything to get rid of them or at least to get them under control. I tried every suggestion I found online. Spraying with pepper spray and garlic and rotten eggs with garlic and Neem oil and every spray you could possibly imagine! I tried coarsely crushed egg shells and coffee grounds and a dozen other things! I tried traps, burying soup can up to their rims in the dirt and putting in leaves from their favorite plants (squashes, brassicas, beans etc, that would be dead and dying because everyone said they prefer decaying food over living food) BULL!! They preferred my happy, healthy, growing plants! I put all kinds of things in the traps. Vegie oil, tuna fish, parts of every plant I was growing. And almost nothing worked.
Only a couple of things worked just a little. The rinds from ½ of a cantaloupe or grapefruit got some each day. Dump them out each morning. But the rinds would dry up, become brittle and break apart in just a few days. And I needed a trap about every 4 feet. At least 50 to 100 traps! I can't eat all that fruit! The other thing that worked fairly well was putting an inch of beer in the soup can traps. The next day every can would be ½ full with pill bugs! Yeah. Dump them out and start again. I went through A CASE of cheap beer in just 2 days! And did not even make a dent in the population! I would go broke doing that!
For years the only thing that kept them under some kind of control was to take every bit of my mulch away and leave each bed dry and barren when I wasn't using it which wasn't improving my soil, it was ruining it further! And to spray all my plants every few days with Spinosad until they grew fairly big and some could take the abuse. And this year they have been getting worse again and the Spinosad isn't doing the trick any more. I just planted 4 kinds of beans again for the FOURTH time. I have been guarding them like a hawk. A week ago I saw a tiny little bit of green and I gently brushed the dirt away to see the sprout. And I saw a dozen F@#$%^&* pill bugs under the dirt eating the sprout before it even had a chance to break ground!!!
Last week in anther thread this subject came up and you suggested I use the soup can trap with potato peels in it. I thought about it a lot. It probably wasn't going to work, nothing works. But I didn't think I had tried that before. That stupid little voice inside my head said 'Don't bother. It won't work!' But that slightly smarter voice in my head said 'For god's sake, give it a try. You have nothing to lose'.
AND IT'S WORKING, IT'S WORKING, IT'S WORKING!!! The traps are filling up with bugs every day! THEY LOVE POTATOES!! I still can't believe it!!!
It's too late to save a lot of my crops this year but I now have about 30 traps out there and they are filling up with pill bugs every day! I add a tiny bit of vegie oil into each trap to make it slippery and they can't possibly get out. This solution is cheap and it won't break the bank. I'll put out another 50 traps this week and keep doing this the rest of the year if necessary or forever. By next summer my nightmare might be over and I can have a super garden!
John, thank you so very, very much. You are my hero!!!
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