When digging up or creating a new bed, many things can come to light - including unpleasant surprises in the form of whitish, fat, worm-like little animals. These are not maggots, but other larvae that should be viewed critically.
Fat, white maggots in the lawn are grubs
What are these soil dwellers?
If, while digging up your garden lawn, you come across small, whitish little fellows that you spontaneously classify as maggots, they probably have the following characteristics:
- Worm-like, caterpillar-like segmented appearance
- C-curved
- 4-7 cm long
- Light creamy white to yellowish colour
- 3 bent pairs of breastbones
- Dark head and abdomen
You can put a tick on all these appearance characteristics? Then you are dealing with grubs. These are not maggots (maggots form a special group within the insect larvae), but the larvae of certain beetle species. They differ from maggots by their existing head capsule and leg appendages. If grubs live in the lawn, they are very likely to have come from May, June or garden leaf beetles.
Are the animals harmful?
Yes, May, June and garden chafer grubs are classified as pests, unlike other grub species such as rose and rhinoceros beetles. They feed on the roots of living plants, preferably grass roots. The result is stunted, yellowish islands in the lawn that can be easily detached. But also in the vegetable patch, grubs can deprive the hobby gardener of his cultivated plants underground.
What should I do?
Collect manually
In order to get rid of the grubs, you should first take simple, mechanical measures: It is best to thoroughly dig up the places where you have already found grubs and collect the whitish larvae by hand. Also examine the rest of the garden for sedentary plants and dig there for any other grubs. It can be helpful to water the soil when collecting. That drives the grubs up.
long-term treatment
Direct collection is the most immediate measure. In view of the longevity of the grubs, however, long-term action must be taken. Against this background, a trap in the form of a bucket filled with horse manure, which you bury in the ground, is useful. He strongly attracts the larvae and collects them over a year so that they can then simply be taken out of the ground together with the bucket.
In addition, the use of predatory nematodes, which parasitize and kill the larvae, is recommended.