Cadenela : Mars attacks! Earth fights back...

We've been pondering a plethora of options on how to minimize the damage caused by this family of insects.

A quite broad description of the damage, the menace and the palliative measures has already been given on this blog here, but for those who would like a quick reminder, the damage looks like this:

Otiorhynchus damage

Whilst the perpetrator has more or less (there are several types of them wandering around our orchards) this look:

The menace!

So, we ended with about one thousand trees with developement issues, and several tens dead . And obviously, hours and hours spent minimizing the damage. Whilst some plant infusions did have a repelling effect, those insects are active for several months and it simply was not possible to keep up with their innumerable forces on the field.

Finally, one option has been agreed as the (potentially) most effective whilst at the same time not disruptive or distructive for the orchard biodiversity, not invasive, not polluting, and not changing the soil chemistry. Too good to be true? I certainly hope not.

So what is this option on which we pose so much hope? Big roll of drums, it's a half millimetre worm. It's a member of the Nematodes gang: a brief and techy explanation here, and a more detailed and easy to understand here. To cut a long story short, those little guys search for the larvae of specific insects and parassite on them, thus eliminating the threat to our trees. Obviosly not all is that easy: we had to nail a narrow window of soil temperature, humidity, spray them fast as they do not swim that well, water the plants right away to push the nematodes underground... Here some pics of how it all looked: