Get Rid Of Fall Armyworms Before They Conquer Your Lawn

Learn about fall armyworm treatment and how to deal with the damage these pests cause.

Army Worms
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People are always yapping about needing smaller lawns . Now that can happen, and they won't need to lift a finger. In fact, they can wake up in the morning to find their lawns completely gone, thanks to the infamous fall armyworm ( Spodoptera frugiperda ). Fall armyworms are the larvae of a small, brownish-gray moth. They plague a number of agricultural crops, such as corn, soybeans, cotton, peanuts, and sorghum, but when the pickings get slim due to hot, dry weather, the moths and caterpillars head for greener pastures, like your lawn that you've dutifully watered several times a week. Learn how to spot armyworms and how to get rid of them if they invade your lawn.

How to Spot Armyworms

What do armyworms look like? You'll never see them coming. Female moths will lay up to 2,000 tiny eggs right on the grass blades. The eggs hatch a few days later. At first, the tiny caterpillars are green with a black head. As they devour the grass over 14 days or so, they change to brown with white lines on the side and a reddish-brown head. They grow to more than an inch long. If you see this gobbling your grass, your lawn is in trouble.

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Fall armyworm. Yuck!.

Why They Are Called Armyworms

Fall armyworms get their name because thousands of them literally march across a lawn like an army, eating as they go. They emerge in late summer and fall, which allows this pest several generations to do their damage in the South. People with heavily infested lawns report they can actually hear the munching. These caterpillars are sneaky assassins, moving only at night and crawling into silk-lined burrows during the day. You may first notice their presence as a brown patch of lawn that gets bigger every day. Or you may walk out one morning to find nothing but dirt where a lawn was just the night before.

Where Fall Armyworms Invade

Fall armyworms infest just about every state east of the Mississippi, but are the most problematic in the Southeast. That's because where autumn comes early up north, they may be limited to one or two generations per year. In the South, you can get twice as many. Yay! Twice the chance of having a bare dirt yard! Let's turn on the sprinkler and play in the mud right now!

What Attracts Armyworms

Wet conditions, long grasses, and grassy weeds attract adult moths to your yard, where they will lay all of those eggs. Keep your grass cut short, and remove debris like fallen leaves so armyworms won’t have places to hide from predators like wasps, spiders, and birds that will take care of them for you. To keep these pests from attacking your yard, improve the drainage of any wet areas in your lawn to eliminate moist spots where armyworms like to lay eggs. Dethatching your lawn can also remove any inviting areas.

How to Attack Fall Armyworms

I have good news and bad news about armyworm damage. If you have a zoysia grass lawn, you're in the clear. Fall armyworms don't like zoysia. The bad news is that they love Bermuda grass, St. Augustine, Kentucky bluegrass, and tall fescue. The first two types of grass usually survive the onslaught and come back. The latter two often die.

The key to defeating fall armyworms is spotting them early before they pull that last all-nighter on your lawn. For armyworm treatment, if you catch them while the caterpillars are a half-inch long or smaller, you can take the natural route and spray your grass with a harmless bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that kills only caterpillars. It won't work on mature caterpillars, though. For them, I recommend buying a bottle of garden insecticide labeled for armyworms that you can attach to the end of a hose. This makes spraying the lawn quick and easy. Granular lawn insecticides don't work well.

Pests are a pain most gardeners must contend with. We may not be able to predict invasions, but we can always reduce our chances of attack and treat accordingly when wounded.

Have you had to battle armyworms on your own turf? Did you save your lawn in the nick of time or was it a goner?

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