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Dogwood Sawfly

Teaching Moments in the Garden

March 27, 2022

Fickle Days of Winter
A teaching moment in my garden was learning about Western North Carolina’s interesting and sometimes challenging transition to spring. My first gardening year in WNC provided several days of 75-to-80-degree weather in February. Since my new neighborhood was fully bursting into bloom and I was eager to get into the garden, I happily started my early spring gardening activities. Much to my chagrin, I soon learned about the multiple stages of winter in WNC, including Blackberry Winter. I now know that it’s best to wait until Mother’s Day to install tender plants here. My lesson:  Be wise. Be safe. Pause and do a little research before jumping into any new gardening activity.
By Catherine Pawlik, Extension Master GardenerSM Volunteer

Editor’s Note:  For more information about Blackberry Winter, see:
https://www.buncombemastergardener.org/?s=blackberry+winter
For an interactive map of average first and last frost dates in NC, see:
https://gardening.ces.ncsu.edu/average-first-and-last-frost-dates/

Red twig dogwood in winter

Supporting Nature’s Food Web
A teaching moment in my garden occurred when I witnessed some birds feeding on sawfly larvae which were feeding on my red twig dogwood. I had been hand-picking the pests for years, not realizing that they were natural food for the birds visiting my yard. I have since discovered that sawfly larvae are also food for lizards, frogs, ants, predatory wasps, and other beneficial insects. While other gardeners may not tolerate a defoliated red twig dogwood in late summer, I’ve decided to accept it.

There are many different species of sawflies—pine, dogwood, elm, rose, hibiscus, and others. Species are host-plant specific, meaning the dogwood sawfly isn’t going to migrate among host plants to attack pines. Although no one wants their prized thunderhead pine stripped of all its needles, a gardener may decide to ignore sawfly on an otherwise healthy red twig dogwood. Most plants will survive an onslaught of sawflies unless the infestation becomes very severe.

Dogwood sawfly larvae in next to last development stage_Whitney Cranshaw_CO State Univ
Dogwood sawfly larvae

Watching the birds devouring sawfly larvae taught me a lesson:  Pay close attention to how my garden supports a complex food web. Plants provide food and habitats for all kinds of animals—insects, spiders, butterflies, beetles, birds, squirrels—which in turn become part of nature’s food chain. Today, before I charge into the garden to do battle with pests, I take time to correctly define the problem and my action plan. What is the insect and is it harmful or beneficial? What is the plant’s susceptibility to damage? Is treatment needed? If so, what kind, when, and how? Gardeners call this Integrated Pest Management or IPM.

I’ve learned that removing one food source or habitat may disrupt the natural system, where even an insect pest contributes to the food chain. For now, I’ll continue to love my red twig dogwood both for bird food and its beautiful red stems in winter.
By Judy Lemanski, Extension Master GardenerSM Volunteer

Editor’s Note:  For more information on identifying and controlling sawflies, see:
https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/search_results?q=sawflies&collection=
https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/dogwood-sawfly
https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/sawflies/
For information about Integrated Pest Management, see:
https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/extension-gardener-handbook/8-integrated-pest-management-ipm 

Preying Mantis_Ken Venron_CC BY 2.0_Flickr
Praying Mantis

Future Gardener Discovers a ‘Stick’
One morning I was sipping coffee on the patio and watching my three-year-old granddaughter pluck leaves off a nearby bush.  “Gramma, Gramma.  Come here quick,” she cried.  “Look at the stick.  Look at the stick.”  I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about.  Then I saw it!  A praying mantis, perched on a stem of the shrub and looking just like a stick!  Maddie watched with amazement as it rubbed a front leg across its face, cocked its head, and then slowly crawled away!  And I captured the teaching moment to tell my granddaughter (who hated bugs) all about the importance of good bugs in the garden.  It was “just a stick,” but it led my little future gardener on scavenger hunts, searching for more bugs and making up stories about their lives in the garden.
Beth Leonard, Extension Master GardenerSM Volunteer 

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Categories General Gardening Tags Dogwood Sawfly, IPM, soil-full musings

Kids Post: What is chewing the trees?

September 23, 2019

In fall we watch for tree leaves to turn pretty colors—but before they turn you may see that a lot of those leaves are being chewed up! What eats tree leaves?

Leaf chewers

Although many people call leaf chewers “worms,” most aren’t worms at all! They are the early stages—called larvae—of a variety of insects.

Caterpillars are larvae that grow up to be butterflies or moths. Although many caterpillars eat plants such as milkweeds or members of the carrot family—including parsley and dill—some prefer trees!

  • Inchworms (fall cankerworms) are fun to watch because they move by inching along, but they can do lots of leaf damage to many of our most popular trees, including maples, oaks, beeches, and hickories. The adults are gray moths; the males have wings, but the females are wingless!
  • Inchworm

    Fall cankerworm wingless female moth
  • Catalpa worms can eat most all the leaves off catalpa trees during the summer—they become sphinx moths!
  • Catalpa worm

    Catalpa worm damage
  • Orangestriped oakworms strip leaves from many types of oak trees as fall approaches—they become orange moths with a white spot on each wing.
  • Orange striped oakworm
  • Fall webworms are another moth caterpillar whose larvae eat the leaves of many trees— birches, cherries, crabapples, hickories, sourwoods, and walnuts—they live inside a web until they are ready to form a cocoon to become a fluffy white moth next spring.
  • Fall Webworm (Hyphantria cunea)_James Emery_CC BY 2.0_Flickr
    Fall webworms

Sawfly larvae grow up to be sawflies—they are small flying insects that lives such short lives that you may never see the adults—or mistake them for wasps if you do! The good news is they cannot sting. Their larvae can do a lot of damage to trees and shrubs, though. Dogwood sawfly larvae may “skeletonize” the leaves of many types of dogwoods, leaving just the leaf veins!

Dogwood sawfly larvae
Dogwood sawfly larvae damage

What can you do about leaf chewers?

Birds and predatory insects feed on these critters, helping manage the damage! Also, most of these leaf chewers do their eating late enough in the year that the trees will soon drop their leaves anyway, so most don’t suffer any serious harm.

  • Catalpa worms eat a bit earlier in the summer, though, and if you love to fish, you can help save tree leaves by collecting these chewers to use as bait!
  • You can stop fall webworm damage by disturbing the web—get an adult to help you cut off any of the webbed areas, use a stick to tear up the web, or use a strong stream of water from a garden hose to bust up the web!
  • Some years fall cankerworms can eat almost all the tree leaves, producing a lot of droppings— their swinging down on spiderweb-like strands bothers some people, too! You can ask an adult to help you trap the new female moths as they crawl up the trees later this fall, once the leaves have dropped and we’ve had a freeze. The City of Charlotte has instructions for how to make sticky band traps: https://charlottenc.gov/Engineering/LandscapeManagement/Trees/Documents/CankerwormBrochure2017.pdf#search=fall%20cankerworm

Article by Debbie Green, Extension Master GardenerSM Volunteer

 For More Information:

Inchworms (fall cankerworm):

https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/fall-cankerworm

Catalpa worms:

http://capitalnaturalist.blogspot.com/2015/07/catalpa-sphinx-moth-caterpillars.html

Orangestriped oakworms:

https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/orangestriped-oakworm

Fall webworms:

https://www.buncombemastergardener.org/tag/fall-webworms/

Dogwood sawfly:

https://hortnews.extension.iastate.edu/2009/8-12/sawfly.html

 

 

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Categories Gardening for Children Tags Catalpa Worm, children gardening, Dogwood Sawfly, Fall Cankerworm, insects, orange-striped oak worm

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