-By Randy Cooper
Many Georgia hunters will not forget the year 2003. Some really good bucks fell to our arrows that year, but we also had record crop and food plot failures due to something that we never saw coming - a thief in the night.
The story I’m about to tell you is true and has a valuable lesson to be learned from it. Read carefully, it may just help save your food plots and vegetable gardens this fall.
My best friend of over 25 years, Jon Henning, and I have been strictly bow hunters since the mid 80’s. Meriwether County Georgia is one of the most highly sought after places to hunt big bucks. I learned an awful lot from him about planting food plots, how important their shapes are and where to strategically place them on our property. He is a hunting machine and I have more respect for his knowledge and abilities than any other hunter I know.
Jon had gone through all the ritualistic chores of hiring a tractor to disc up a full acre in a place right along a travel corridor that was flat and didn’t have many trees. He hired a truck load of lime to put on the plot and fertilized it. He made the most beautiful turnip patch you’ve ever seen. With the lime and fertilizer he used, these turnips grew big and the leaves were green and healthy. I remember going over to his house and him showing me the turnip greens he had put up for the winter. Every time that he hunted the turnip patch he would grab a few to take home with him as he left the woods.
Jon doesn’t like to use a flashlight to go to his stand before daylight. He would walk to a point where, in the pink light of predawn, he could see the turnip patch. He used it as a landmark that told him where to enter his approach trail to the stand. It was early October and Jon had taken the day off on a Thursday to hunt the club literally by himself. He knew a good buck was working the turnip patch and wanted to get a shot at it before the other club members came down for the weekend. He didn’t see the buck he wanted that day so he returned Saturday morning. As he got to the familiar place on the hill where he could see the turnip patch, he couldn’t find it. It usually looked lime green against the dark woods and was easy to spot but even as he stood there letting it get lighter, he still couldn’t see it.
It was now light enough to see the ground well enough to continue. He walked to the edge of where the turnip patch should have been and almost passed out. IT WAS GONE!!!! He walked out into the middle of an almost bare ground spot where his food plot was just two days ago and stood there. In the dark silence of morning he could hear a sound that resembled two pieces of 80 grit sand paper being rubbed together. A grinding, chewing sound he would never forget. As the sun climbed higher, he said it looked like the ground he was standing on was moving.
He was looking at the results of the devastating power of FALL ARMYWORMS!!!! In less than 48 hours they had completely wiped out a healthy turnip patch that was over an acre in size. What was left was brown and dead. He was sick. All the planning, preparation, money and time that it took to create this beautiful food plot, was for nothing. We went to the local archery shop not far from where we hunted and told them what had happened. We started hearing that other hunters in the area were also being hit by a caterpillar-like worm that could wipe out everything in a food plot in a single night. These hunters had never seen or heard of anything like this before. By the end of the season, we had heard many stories around the area just like Jon’s.
I contacted our local County Extension Agent, Paul Pugliese, to find out more about fall armyworms. Paul was a valuable source of information on the subject. Paul said that in the fall of some years, not every year, a mature moth will migrate from Florida into parts of Georgia around late-September and into October, about the time most fall food plots are up and going good. The moths come here and search out a host crop to lay eggs on. Each moth can lay hundreds of eggs at a time. It seems that the eggs are evolved to hatch at the same time in the form of a caterpillar-like worm. This is the larvae stage of the moth. It ranges in color from greenish brown to black with lines running the length of their body. For two to three weeks the larvae feed on the host crop that is deposited on, to the point of absolute destruction. Many times nothing is left. They are so aggressive that they could be compared to locusts descending on crops. They feed on broadleaf plants, vegetables and legumes.
What can you do about them? Keep a close eye on your food plots. Talk to your neighbors in the area and see if they have seen anything suspicious going on in their gardens or crops. The best thing you can do is to apply an insecticide at a regular interval to your plots with a broadcast sprayer or handheld pump type if you can’t access your plot with an ATV. I suggest using LIQUID SEVIN CONCENTRATE available at most hardware or farm supply chain stores. Another chemical that Paul suggested is called LANNATE POWDER. It is mixed with water and sprayed on the crops just like SEVIN. Either will wash off with rain so it’s important to keep some handy whenever you go to your property. This WILL keep the ARMYWORMS under control.
For further information on these pesky critters and other ways to deal with them, I’ve included a couple of websites that have very good information and pictures to help you identify these unbelievably aggressive worms. Don’t become a victim of them. SEVIN concentrate is too cheap not to go to the trouble of using it. Do yourself a big favor, look at this information and educate yourself on ARMYWORMS. Learn how to recognize and control them. Don’t wind up taking a big loss like we did in ’03 when a thief in the night came calling.
Websites for further information:
www.gaipm.org/turf/tarmyworms.html
www.gaipm.org/top50/fallarmyworm.html
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