Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

how do you stop these little cretans from eating your vegies??

Apparently the pest species in Australia is the same one that plagues us in California. Here is the UC Davis info: http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn74102.html

Harvesting all the stuff in a growbed at once can knock them back, but will also mess with your chemistry.

I've found that flooding the bed for an hour or so gets any hiding in gravel to surface where you can pick them off by crushing by hand or dropping into a container of soapy water.

If your growbeds are on stands, you may be able to create a sticky barrier with tanglefoot that will stop invaders.

Good luck.

You can try scrunching up some newspaper and leaving it around your plants. The earwigs hide in the paper, and you intermittantly throw them to the chooks. That should get the numbers down a little but not completly get rid of them.

have tried both methods and have decreased them by about 10 per night. thanks

Do the fish like them?

Do they what! my fingerings are about 60mm and destroy them. great to watch. but it is something different for them to eat other than brine, mosquito larvae and barra pellets

Thats one of the best tricks us AP'er have Any pests that go undergravel dont like being flooded.

earwigs eat your plants????? I don't like earwigs much but I've never noticed them causing any damage to my plants. What kind of damage do they cause? I've noticed earwigs in my worm bins so I figured they probably mostly eat decomposing stuff.

There are lots of types of earwigs that cause little or no damage, but the European earwig is a nasty pest and infests both California and Australia. Not sure where else.... You may have the ones that are decent neighbors.

don't know what type they are but they hide during the day in small dark crevices and come out and feed at night, especially on the foliage of beans, and zuchinis in my grow beds and potato foliage in the ground

Sometimes earwigs are falsely accused for snail damage. The best way to tell the difference is to see if your GB has a slime trail - if there's no slime it's probably earwigs. Earwigs are omnivorous and will eat other insects such as aphids, unfortunately they go after your plants as well.

I've found in my greenhouse they are actually doing more good than harm (for now). They're currently controlling my aphid problem so for now I can tolerate the nibbled leaf here and there. Once they start becoming more of a problem I reckon they must go.

The easiest method that I've read about to get rid of these bugs is to fill a tuna can up with a little vegetable oil and place them near where you have the infestation. The earwigs end up drowning. Haven't tried it myself yet but I'll let you know once it comes to that.

They have wiped out my pea seedlings in the dirt bed already here. They do damage alright and everyone seems to have problems with them down here.
The best way I have found is to put icecream/marg/whatever containers around the garden with some beer in them and a layer of oil over the top. This can be fat from the drip tray in the barby or just cooking oil.
They cant resist the beer and get in a drown in there thousands. Trust me it works.
Also, in the dirt garden a product called Beat a Bug can be used but it doesnt kill them just deter and has to be sprayed every evening.
I reckon they have bred up because of our love for mulch around the garden as they never used to be a problem till a few years ago

sounds alo lot like my slater problem, too much wood mulch which they love, i dont have any chooks here (permisson deied from SWMBO ) so my last resort was to use a iron based snail pellets in a high concentration ( much higher than recomended ) seems to have knocked them back to a reasonable level again.

i dont like killing bugs but when they eat waht i want to eat i feel i have to do something

Cheers
pete

I've go to try that one Mantis. I caught some earwigs eating at my flower buds the other night which infuriated me for some reason. I lay some regular oil out but no takers. Never thought of beer.

Yep Nax is onto it, I use marge containers, fill about half with water and mix in some soy sauce and they climb in and drown, I couldn't bring myself to waste beer on the little suckers