Are you seeing holes in your lawn?

I've been getting calls about small holes in people's lawns that are surrounded by the piled up dirt from the hole. These holes are most likely caused by cicada killers, a type of solitary wasp.

Cicada killers are large wasps reaching a length of about 1.5 inches. The wasps have a reddish-brown head and thorax and a black and yellow marked abdomen. The wings are brownish.

Since the wasps are so large, people are often worried about their sting. Females are capable of stinging, males are not. Males are territorial and will often fly near humans walking through an area; this could be to intimidate you and have you get out of their territory or it could be that they need to check if you are a female cicada killer ready to mate. Either way, if you keep to your business they will keep to theirs. Females, while capable of stinging, are not aggressive.

Females dig burrows in the ground where they take cicadas that they paralyze with their sting. The cicadas are placed into chambers off of the main burrow and then an egg is laid in the chamber. When the egg hatches, the larvae consumes the cicada(s) provided for them.

Control really isn't necessary for these wasps.

Saturday, May 29th- Become a Garden Detective!

Get out your calendars and save the date!! No, I'm not getting married or anything (my husband might get a bit upset.....). Susan Decker, a Travis County Master Gardener, and I will be teaching anyone who wants to attend how to become a garden detective. Here's the skinny:

When: Saturday, May 29, 2010 10am-Noon

Where: Zilker Botanical Garden
2220 Barton Springs Rd.
Austin TX 78746

What: learn how to diagnose common problems in the garden

Who: Susan will cover plant diseases; Wizzie (that's me!) will cover insect problems

Here's the official blurb (it's much more eloquent than my ramblings):

Just when you think you've done everything right by your plants, one of them starts to go downhill. One of the biggest challenges for gardeners is correctly diagnosing plant problems and finding effective, safe solutions. Is your plant dying because of an insect, environmental or disease problem? Join us to learn the causes of plant problems, the process for diagnosing plant problems, and preventive garden management techniques. This seminar is free and open to the public. It is presented by the Travis County Master Gardeners Association, a volunteer arm of the Texas AgriLife Extension Service in Travis County. For information, see http://www.tcmastergardeners.org or call the Travis County Master Gardener's help desk at (512) 854-9600.

Feel free to bring samples of insects/ damage.

Holy snails batman!

After two years of drought, Austin has been receiving much needed rain this spring. While I welcome the rain, maybe even go so far as to say I love the rain, it does have some downsides.

1. Snails.
2. It's difficult to do my fire ant field work when it seems to rain every three days.
3. Even more snails.
4. One of my mountain laurels died and the other one didn't bloom this year due to copious amounts of moisture.
5. Have I mentioned snails?

So I've been overrun with snails in my yard. I'm not talking here or there I find clusters; I'm talking "holy moley there are snails EVERYWHERE"! I'm talking about walking through the backyard and hearing crunching of snail shells under foot. The snail fairy hasn't been visiting anyone but me apparently, so you can leave you thank notes in the comments section below for handling everyone's snail problems. I finally had the opportunity to take my own advice from a previous blog post on snails and did some hand picking this past week. The snails were chucked into a pail of soapy water.

While I felt somewhat bad at first for potentially killing off populations of Gary (Spongebob reference there for all you fans...), it really came down to them or me, well to be more exact, them or my plants and my plants won out. Check out the haul.....536! Yes, I counted. I couldn't get over the pile that I wound up with.

Since it took several mornings of snail picking, the pile was quite gross and smelly by the time I got around to taking photos and counting, but that's okay, I'm a professional, right? I got the added bonus of capturing some photos of blow flies that were taking advantage of the pile of rotting snail corpses.

By the way....when I let the dogs out this morning I saw 3 snails hanging out on the side of the house and one on my agave. ARGH!