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Hello, Please could you help with suggestions. Whenever I read of vine weevil control the products to use are for pot grown plants. My Heuchera etc.are planted in the ground and I have lost few. I think another plant is being attacked but cannot find the the little ****. Is there anything I can use to treat the plant and ground? I have about 20 plants.
Yours Sincerely, desperate , Mrs L M Lear
Hi Lindsay
Sorry to hear your having a problem.
They are a pest for lots of plants not just heucheras. Heucheras are more noticeable as they look fabulous for about 10 months (if not longer) of the year!
You can treat your garden with Nematodes which you can water into the ground once the temperature doesn’t go below 6 degrees, any lower and it kills the Nematodes.
August and September is the best time, do twice if you can.
Nematodes are the green way and because they are a living natural predator of vine weevil larvae they don’t cause other environmental issues.
That having been said one of the best ways in the spring to cope with them is to dig up the plant, wash its roots off (if it still has them) if not wash the stalk. Take a good look in the stalky bits as the grubs go in there and are hard see, pick them out with a cocktail stick.
Then before you pop back into the ground dig the ground up and search for grubs, go and have a coffee/ tea when you come back hopefully the birds will have picked the rest out if there was anymore
It’s not as hard as it sounds, but if you don’t sort them they won’t go away, it just gets worse.
If you remove the heucheras you will still have the problem just in different plant, which might not be as easy to cure.
Hope this helps
Vicky and Richard Fox
