A SEASON OF PESTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 70, 24 March 1938, Page 8

A SEASON OF PESTS

It will be no news to anybody who has a garden that insect and other pests, particularly the white butterfly, have been worse this summer than in any other year almost wilhin memory. Reports from other districts show that the trouble is widespread and extends probably over the whole of the Dominion. Market gardens have been ruined and farmers' rape and root crops destroyed wholesale. Here the diamond-back moth has also been at work and the farming community in the Wairarapa is so concerned that a request is to be made to the Cawthr'on Institute for a "thorough scientific investigation into the tremendous increase in the pests with a view to eradication." What new features scientific investi-j gafion would reveal it is impossible at the present to say. but the general opinion is that the plague of pests is due to the abnormally warm and i humid weather of the last few months, a condition highly favourable to the proliferation of all forms of insect life. It is probably too late to repair the damage this season and the only hope seems to lie in the early advent of colder weather. There is nothing like a good sharp southerly for fidding the air, for the time at any rate, of the multitude of insect pests that plague human existence. It is on occasions like these that most people would not mind the prospect of a hard winter.