I just came across this video from Fred at Fred's Fine Fowl. It's an ingenious Japanese Beetle Trap that funnels the beetles right to the chickens! I'm going to have to keep this in mind although I think I'd replace the old shoelaces with something else. Great job Fred!
Do you have any clever ideas or inventions that you have created or adapted for use? I'd love to hear about them!
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
Well, I don't have one that I can post photos of. I pulled this one off years ago, when I was determined to have a backyard garden free of bug spray.
Hungry grasshoppers live here in the low desert. Some years we have plagues of them. There's also a moth whose larvae dearly love lettuce and tomato leaves. They were decimating my wonderful organic garden. Here's how I beat them:
First, I laid soaker hose down between the rows. Then I built a frame made of wood scraps--one by two's mostly -- that I'd scrounged from a lumberyard. This I nailed in place over the vegetable bed.
Then I bought several yards of that nylon netting stuff you used to see in bridal veils and, back in the 50s, to make stiff petticoats. In those days you could get it at Penney's, and it was amazingly cheap. Using an upholstery needle and some light cotton twine, I basted lengths of it together to make a single covering wide enough and long enough to stretch over the frame and drape onto the ground.
Then I took a pair of wire cutters to a handful of wire clothes hangers, the sort that come from the cleaners. Each hanger produced about three pieces of stiff wire that I could bend into a U shape. These I used like camping stakes to hold the netting firmly to the ground.
To water, then, all I had to do was connect the garden hose to the soaker and turn on the tap. Getting at the plants was just a matter of pulling up a few wire "stakes," folding back the fabric, and then replacing it when I was done in the garden.
It worked to keep the bugs out!
LOL! Nothing kept my neighbor out, though, until I put up a fence and installed a German shepherd in the backyard.
@Funny - perfect! I understand that pefectly. Row covers of tulle supported by coat hangar wire. That's ingenious!
Nice! The only Japanese Beetle Trap I had ever seen before was Yoko Ono.
YOKO ONO!!! HAHAHAHAHA
Post a Comment