538 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
WIREWORMS. PLANTS THAT REPEL THEM. BUCKWHEAT. 
probably from their acridity, and there being no other roots iu 
the soil for them to live on, and no weeds or other plants beino- 
permitted to grow during the season but the mustard, the insects 
necessarily die of famine. 
In this country, attention has been much directed to buckwheat, 
as being a crop which cleanses the ground in which it is grown 
from these vermin. It is remarked in the Cultivator (1859, p. 
107), that this grain seems quite offensive to the wireworm, and 
growing close and thick, it leaves nothing for them to feed upon, 
and thus starves them out. Hon. A. B. Dickenson, in his address 
before the Courtland County Agricultural Society, in the year 
1855, said: “I have heard it stated that five bushels of salt to the 
acre, or one hundred bushels of lime, would destroy wireworms. 
I have tried both; and have sowed ten bushels of salt to the acre, 
and they only laughed at my folly. I tried one hundred bushels 
of lime, as recommended, and they fattened on my bounty. I 
have only proved one remedy for the rascals, and that is to break 
the sod and sow it to buckwheat; plow late and as often as possi¬ 
ble in the fall, and then sow it to peas in the spring; with the like 
plowing next fall, they will not disturb any crop the next season.” 
It is scarcely necessary to cite other notices of this remedy. Ob¬ 
jections are made to it as being an inferior, uncertain crop, which 
leaves much of its seed in the ground, growing to the injury of 
the succeeding crops. And the experience of A. G. Pcrcey, as 
reported in the Rural New Yorker, (vol. xiii, p.^6), casts doubts 
upon its efficacy. He states that having had two acres of corn, 
growing in a low spot in an old meadow, totally destroyed by 
wireworms, he sowed the ground the last of Juno to buckwheat 
and a strip of corn, to notice if the latter would be more eaten 
than the former. And the worms appeared to relish the buck¬ 
wheat quite as well as the corn, destroying between a quarter and 
a half of each of these grains. Winter wheat was sown upon this 
ground the following autumn, and was almost all destroyed. Oats 
were sown upon it the next spring and a heavy crop was obtained, 
uninjured by the worms. It merits to be noticed that this was 
the third year that the ground had been under the plow, thus in¬ 
dicating that the worms had all completed their growth and had 
left the soil the two previous years. 
Bjerkander made several experiments, to ascertain by what 
means the wireworms could be destroyed. He placed soveral 
