CUTWORMS AND WIREWORMS 305 



and protected rather than destroyed. Spiders and wasps also prey 

 on cutworms. 



Plants may be protected by pressing stiff cylinders of paper or 

 tin down into the soil about the stems, allowing them to project 

 about two inches above the ground, or each plant may be wrapped 

 in a piece of newspaper as it is transplanted from the seed-bed. 



Wireworms. If the larger garden seeds are not coming up 

 and you dig down and find them being eaten by a flattish, yellowish, 

 slim worm which you try to pull apart and find it very tough, you 

 are being visited by wireworms. You may also find such worms 

 destroying your seed potatoes or burrowing into cabbage stalks or 

 other vegetables with fleshy roots. These worms begin by eating 

 the sprouting seed and continue eating roots until they are fully 

 grown, when they make earthen cocoons in the ground and trans- 

 form into long, slim beetles which are called skip or click beetles, 

 because they snap themselves over when laid upon their backs. 



Wireworms can be fought in the garden by a very thin scat- 

 tering of nitrate of soda along the proposed rows. They can also 

 be killed by poisoning things which they like, like cut potatoes or 

 other roots, green alfalfa, etc., and burying these in the ground in 

 advance of planting. But if the garden spot is badly infested it is 

 better to make a new garden on clean land and kill out the pests 

 by starving and burning. Go at it in midsummer, plow up deeply 

 (for the worms go down as far as eight inches) and expose the soil 

 to autumn heat and drouth as much as possible. Leave it rough 

 and let it bake and blister in the sun as much as it can, and fence 

 the fowls on it. The following winter put on grain, cut it early 

 for hay and then plow up the stubble and disk it deeply at intervals 

 next summer to continue the drying and burning process on the 

 worms and keep on the fowls to do the catching also. If you keep 

 at this for a full year vegetables will be reasonably safe the year 

 following. 



The best natural enemies of wireworms are frogs and toads, 

 and the horned toad is particularly good at them. 



Eelworms or Nematodes. Practically all fleshy roots and 

 bulbs among garden plants are liable to attack by eelworms which 

 are so small that one cannot discern their details without a micro- 

 scope. Their work is usually manifested by mal-formed or de- 

 formed and enlarged roots and rootlets. No treatment has been 

 demonstrated to be effective in destroying them and saving the 

 plant which should be dug up and burned. Dig a hole, put back the 

 diseased roots with a good lot of straw and bake the hole good and 

 plenty. When the crop is off dig or plow up loosely and let the soil 

 bake as dry as possible until the rains come and then plant grain for 

 hay and take a piece of new ground for vegetables if possible. These 

 pests have done great injury to potatoes recently and seed potatoes 

 should be free from them. 



