Japanese Beetles

Eek.  We see Japanese beetles on our rose bushes these days.  I’ve been hearing horror stories about these voracious devouring bugs who destroy gardens and lawns.  David met me at the door, “We’ve got Japanese beetles on the hibiscus tree.”  Since then, we have found the beetles on several of our bushes and trees.  Being the computer savvy person that I am, I looked up how to kill Japanese beetles from the US Department of Agriculture and printed off the information.  I asked for help from my Facebook friends and received several helpful suggestions.

The info said pluck off beetles that you see and drown them in soapy water.  Easy enough.  We did that wearing gloves (of course) and wondering how many more would fly into our yard.  A few days into this battle, we find daily inspection and spraying isn’t too much. 

David went to our local store and bought the appropriate treatments and we’ve been inspecting and treating bushes, flowers and small trees.  Apparently you have to deal with the adult beetles and then there are the larvae which eat the lawn grass.  He bought the granular insecticide to treat the larvae so they don’t destroy our lawn grass.  We see some ‘lacy’ leaves on our plants but so far, the plants still look good so we think we’ve caught the situation early. 

For a couple plant-lovers like us, this is worrisome and stressful. These beetles can fly and just when we think we’ve got them all plucked and drowned, more fly onto our plants.  We like our flowers and we’ve made it a part of our ‘care for ourselves.’ We get good exercise while working in our flower garden and we enjoy looking at the beautiful flowers.  We hope our plants will survive this beetle season. Time will tell.