Wireworm on the potato. Did you notice damaged potatoes when digging: small black dots on the surface of the tubers and inside? Yes, it’s a disaster! Measures to combat wireworm are diverse. I think that any gardener who grows potatoes, when harvesting or sorting, noticed that some tubers were pierced with a nail or wire. This is the work of the nasty yellow little worm. It is he who gnaws “tunnels” in the potato tuber, which not only spoil the presentation, but adversely affect its storage. Yes, and there is such a potato, most likely we will not. The length of the wireworm is 2-2.5 cm. A lot of folk remedies to combat it have been accumulated. Let's look at all this in more detail.
Potato in black holes, what to do? It’s difficult to deal with wireworms, but you can. Even without any “chemistry”. Lure the pest even with a 20-centimeter depth will succeed in food bait. Take pieces of potatoes, beets, wet bran, bury shallow in the soil. Mark the place with a stick or peg. In a day or two, dig this place - destroy the gathered around and inside the bait of the "parasites" - wireworms. Then dig in the bait again. Having done this several times, each time you will notice that there will be less and less yellow worms on the bait.
Just remember that the wireworm in the soil moves mostly vertically. In the horizontal direction, it changes its location by no more than 15-20 cm. That is, if you buried the bait in one place, then the larvae that are half a meter from this food will not find it. This suggests that there should be a lot of lures. They should be located at a small distance from each other.
After several “sessions” - an almost one hundred percent guarantee that your potatoes or other root crops will be whole, and you will get rid of the wireworm.
Usually, bait is set 1.5-2 weeks before planting potatoes or other vegetable crops. Watch a video on the performance of a sprouted corn seed trap.
There is another way to deal with wireworms.
We usually plow the garden in the fall, in the month of October. And you need to plow or dig the garden after the first frost. In this case, the pest will be closer to the surface of the earth. He will no longer be able to crawl into the lower non-freezing layers of the soil. When the first frost sets in, it will die completely. Here is such a simple, cheap way to get rid of wireworms, to lure him out of the soil.
I think that in the middle zone of Russia this method is most effective, since the first frosts already occur in the month of September. In our Kuban, they can only be in November, or even in December. By this time, usually everyone is already digging or plowing their gardens.