Another person’s trash, another person’s treasure… this year my seedlings are falling victim to pillbugs. Three garden beds are overflowing with the creatures. What is usually benign to beneficial has become malignant. They’ve eaten pepper, tomato, eggplant and broccoli seedlings. They are not interested in the dill, which is the one plant I actually have in abundance.
So, I’m setting the beer traps and wrapping the new seedlings in collars and trying to figure out what happened. Last year there were a few trying to eat some of my potatoes, but nothing like this.
My best guess so far goes back a little ways. I think, maybe, I planted something in those garden beds a few years ago that was particularly attractive to pill bugs (also called potato bugs, roly polys, or maybe wood louse, depending on who you ask – and some may disagree with the accuracy of alternate names!).
Pills bugs live a remarkably long time, I’ve learned – a few years. Not quite the same scale as a fruit fly. They also don’t start laying eggs right away, it takes a few years. Hence my timeline – I unwittingly attracted them, and now they have exponentially increased their populations.
What attracts pillbugs? Dead and decaying things. I don’t trench compost, but I do often leave old plants in the garden over the winter. I think that might have done it, I think I had some old broccoli or other brassica with a huge stalk, and I didn’t cut it off at the soil level when I had the chance, so the whole thing started rotting in situ – beaconing the pill bugs to come and feast, and move into the neighbourhood while they’re at it.
Lesson learned – including that the plants I left over the winter in OTHER beds are likely to have this issue next spring. The tops of my old plants, like the pill bugs, belong in my compost.