Wireworms .
A Garden Corner.
DREADS the wireworm more than the potato grower for it has a particular partiality for that necessary vegetable. The wireworm is a long lived individual, often living three to four years in the soil before developing into the adult click beetle. The wireworm is of a brownish colour, about an inch long, smooth, shiny, hard, and provided with a good boring snout with which to tunnel into its favourite potato. They are necessarily thickest in old pasture, and as such land is nearly always given over to potatoes for a first crop, the evil effect of its presence is generally very pronounced at lifting time. The best cure is undoubtedly cultivation and working the soil, as then the larvae has not time to be effective. Soil fumigation by means of horticultural naphthalene, two hundredweight to the acre, is the next best check. The beetle gets its name from the similar sound it makes in moving around, and is also brown in colour. It belongs to the order Elateridae. Pieces of potato or carrot placed about in the soil can be used as traps and will catch many of the wireworms. T. D. LENNIE.
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS19331226.2.135.7
Bibliographic details
Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 954, 26 December 1933, Page 9
Word Count
197Wireworms. Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 954, 26 December 1933, Page 9
Using This Item
Star Media Company Ltd is the copyright owner for the Star (Christchurch). You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Star Media. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Log in