How to fight mole crickets in your garden

If you've been bringing manure into your garden or someone nearby raises pigs, you may well find holes in your garden made by mole crickets as they dig their way through the soil. These voracious creatures don't shy away from cucumbers and tomatoes, and they love your cabbage and potatoes. Young seedlings are a particular delicacy for them. Just look how convenient they are. planting cucumbers in 5-liter bottles/

The mole cricket loves your greenery, especially if your soil is well-tended, manured, moist, and suitable for its development. But you need to address this problem as soon as you notice its presence in your garden. There are numerous folk remedies and chemicals available. If you absolutely don't want to use chemicals in your garden, poison your plants, or risk the birds eating the dead insects, then you should heed the advice of experienced gardeners who have already learned a variety of methods to combat mole crickets, which have helped them destroy their crops from the pernicious mole cricket.

Mole cricket - when is the greatest danger lurking?

It's important to understand that the mole cricket lays eggs in late May. By mid- to late June, if left unchecked, they'll all hatch, and your garden will be overrun with hordes of mole crickets, making it virtually impossible to control them, and you'll simply lose the harvest you've invested so much time and effort into. Therefore, we begin the fight in early spring, or even better, in the fall, by laying piles of manure, boards, and roofing felt in the empty garden. When the cold weather sets in, the mole crickets will crawl under these piles to bask. Cover them there, preventing them from overwintering, thereby minimizing their presence in the garden in the spring. If we fail to do so in the fall, then begin combating the mole cricket in early spring using all known methods.

How to fight mole crickets with folk remedies

Using a regular jar You can lure the mole cricket to the surface and drown it with various contents. Beer, honey, sweet, sour compote, or spoiled jam are used for this purpose. Fill a regular jar 1/5 full with these contents, or coat the inside with honey, and bury it in the ground up to the neck in areas where honey accumulates. What happens is that the mole cricket, sensing the delicious and pleasing aroma, crawls to the surface and crawls into the jar to slurp up the treat. But it can't escape due to the slippery walls of the jar. It either dies there, or you remove it and destroy it.

Chicken manure — as gardeners claim, the mole cricket flees in panic from this remedy; they water their plants with diluted droppings, thereby receiving a double benefit: they fertilize the garden and get rid of the mole cricket.

Onion peels and eggshellsThese products are used when planting seeds or already grown seedlings directly into the hole, or by digging them into furrows around the planted seedlings and covering them with soil. Eggshells should be crushed and mixed with fragrant homemade sunflower oil, the scent of which is so beloved by mole crickets.

Soapy water — Douse the mole fly in its burrows with this solution. Add about 50 grams of washing powder and the same amount of laundry soap to a bucket of water. Pour half a liter into the burrows. You'll either "smoke" the insects out, or they'll die underground. You can also try pouring a little oil into the burrow, then adding water.

Rotten fish They say mole crickets really dislike the smell of rotten fish and it actually drives them away from your property. So don't hesitate to buy some fish heads, let them rot, and bury them half a shovel deep around the edges of your property.

Marigolds and coriander. Gardeners say that cabbage moths are repelled by the scent of cilantro and marigolds. By planting these plants around your garden, you'll get a double benefit: you'll repel the cabbage moths, the beautiful yellow flowers will brighten up your garden, and the cilantro is perfect for soups and salads.

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Protection against cabbage moths using chemical methods

Of course, you could, ignoring all those troublesome folk remedies, buy some chemicals at the store, poison it, and then just throw it out of sight. It must be said, this isn't a very good method—firstly, you could inadvertently poison your plants with the same poison. Secondly, the poisoned mole crawls to the surface, and if you don't remove it promptly, birds or pets will eat it and be poisoned too.
The most important reason why gardeners are now planting their garden plots is to grow clean produce, not contaminated with any poisons, so it's still better to combat this problem with traditional methods.

Of the store-bought medications, they recommend less harmful ones, such as:

Bankol, an insecticide that paralyzes moths. It is claimed to not accumulate in the soil and is harmless to animals.

Phenaxin Plus – within three hours, the mole cricket, having consumed the substance, which has an attractive taste and smell, dies. It is said to be harmless to plants and does not accumulate in the soil.

Rembeck – It's applied during planting, sprinkled into the hole along with the seed. It's claimed that by the time you get the fruit, the effect of the preparation will have long since worn off and won't harm the crop. But this is debatable; you decide for yourself.

How to get rid of mole crickets – reviews

After reading reviews on various gardening forums, you'll learn that people are fighting for their harvest, using all the methods described above with varying success.

Marina My husband tried burying jars of honey and beer. He'd only catch a few, but what's the point? There are a lot of them, so we use Medvetox, and it helps. It's a hassle, though. You have to dilute the porridge, mix it, and bury it, but we're saving the harvest.

Ivan I start fighting this beast in the garden in the fall. I rake up piles of manure, then destroy the mole crickets that hide there from the cold, and I manage to kill half of them before the frost sets in. In the spring, I start again with the same measures. Then I exterminate them with bait, look for egg clutches, dig them up, and feed them to the chickens.

Natalia We use Fenaxin Plus, it helps. My husband also started using Bankol—it also protects us from the Colorado potato beetle; the bastard ate all our potatoes last year. I think we should try all the methods if they fail. Otherwise, what's the point of planting a garden for this nasty creature to feed on? I want to feed my family, not the mole cricket and the Colorado potato beetle. Good luck to everyone!

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