Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: loubylou29 on October 12, 2008, 09:58
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I have just finsihed digging up the last of our spuds, and lots of them (but not all) have little hol;es in them, and I noticed A tiny creature. they look like millepedes, but are so thin, but a good 3 cm long.
They have loads of legs ,and pictures 9google) I have seen of wireworms look like they only have legs at the front.
any ideas??
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you are right it is wireworm :(
the spuds should be OK to eat though, just cut out the bit the worm has burrowed into, but if you are planning on storing your taties then separate the ones with damage and use these up first and store any unblemished ones for use later.
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you are right it is wireworm :(
the spuds should be OK to eat though, just cut out the bit the worm has burrowed into, but if you are planning on storing your taties then separate the ones with damage and use these up first and store any unblemished ones for use later.
Good advice. You might like to follow on with a mustard green manure which confuses the blessed little bugs into breeding early and reduces the numbers in the soil.
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Millepedes are dark brown and have lots of legs all the way along. They only eat rotting material and are usually found in holes already made by slugs. Wireworms are yellow. They are the larval stage of the click beetle. The eggs are laid on grass, which may be weeds in your plot, and they feed on grass roots for up to two years before hatching into beetles. If you have removed the grass roots they will feed on your potatoes rather than starve.
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We had this problem the first year every one of our potatoes was riddled with holes , last year they were not too bad and this year I did'nt find any, I read that if you plant a few cut potatoes in the bed they will go to them - mind you never tried it so dont know if it works
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Thanks all,
Ihave separated them and have been using the holey ones, but I ahdn't found any alive creature in any before last week when I posted, all the sound ones are in storage for when the holey ones are used!!
I have already got mustard growing on the bed to keep the weeds down, so it's even better to know it will help with this problem.
IT is the first year anything has grown in that patch for a long long time so again, good to know the problem might reduce over time.
xx
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So I dug more spuds up yesterday and some of them appear to have scab (urgh!) alot have both scab and this creature, so I took a picture. I hope this works. Some of the potatoes have 8 or 9 of these things, they are what I find if I cut a potato up. They get very curly and have tiny antennae, they are pretty gross actually and are p*ss*ng me off!!
Any ideas??
(http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb80/loubylou30/IMG_4008.jpg)
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They look like baby millipedes to me. They are probably just taking advantage of the damage on your spud to feed, rather than actually causing the damage themselves. I have found groups of them on the bottoms of my some of beetroot if they have a split in them.
The tiny holes do sound like wireworms, as everyone else has said.
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If they have tiny red spots along the sides they are spotted snake millepedes. They only live on rotting material such as slug damage.