The sod webworm is back! Chowing on the grass you put hours
of work into all summer long! Eating at night while you sleep and on cloudy and
rainy days, so birds and you will not catch them in the act of ruining your
lawn! Sod webworms arrive in big numbers and eat so much so fast that they do
not even leave the table to go to the bathroom! Nasty! For those of you that
fought them last year, you knew the time would come to wage war once again.
The moths that lay eggs throughout the lawn are easy to
spot. The moths fly very short distances
in a zigzag pattern, most noticeable at dusk. The moths fly up right from your
feet like a bobwhite quail. Once they lay the eggs, the eggs will begin to
hatch in a week to ten days into the sod webworm larva, a voracious eater of
turfgrass. Damage usually begins in shaded areas first.
The sod webworm larva is an insatiable eater of all types of
grass that we have in the Lowcountry. Seeing groups of birds feeding in your
yard is a good indication you have sod webworms. Another way to tell is that
your yard appears to have been mowed really short; even though, you have not
mowed your grass in a week. The blades of grass have been chewed, giving the
turf a very ragged appearance. If worms of any type (sod webworm, army or cut
worms) are attacking your grass it will appear that you have mowed your grass
with a very dull mower blade at a slow speed and a low cutting height.
If you have any doubts, a soap flush of one ounce dish
detergent in five gallons of water poured over a four square foot area, should
bring them to the surface. You can see the worm if you get into the border
between the good grass and the munched on grass and spread the grass blades
apart. The blades of the grass are tattered and have been chewed, so they are
missing parts of the leaf blade.
If you see damage, be ready to apply control product, or
they will do a lot of damage very quickly to your turf and weeds will move in.
One good thing is that they are very easy to manage, since their entire body is
in contact with the ground. Bt,
Essentria G, EcoPCO WPX and Spinosad are organic controls that are very
effective against young sod webworms. Sevin, Aloft, Bug Blaster, and Cyonara
will easily control the voracious chow-hound.
Since mole crickets and grubs (including grubs that become
Japanese beetles and grubs that are mole food) are up near the surface, I will
use Sevin 7G on my yard. This formulation of Sevin is easy to apply and kills
young mosquitoes (another pest on my kill list), “the nasty rascal, the chinch
bug”, ticks, fleas, and many other lawn pests.
Always read, understand and follow product label. The
product label is a Federal Law.
