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There are quite a few insects that lay their eggs on gooseberries. Their larvae devour berries, stems, leaves, roots. A particular danger is that one female is capable of laying several hundred or thousands of eggs per season. That not to lose the entire crop or to save at least the bushes themselves, you need to find caterpillars on the gooseberry in time and quickly destroy it.
Most often, such pests attack gooseberries:
You need to timely understand which of them is causing you problems, and immediately take measures to preserve the harvest.
It is quite easy to identify this pest. Caterpillars are gray-white, covered with black spots on top, and have yellow stripes on the sides. Their size is quite decent - up to 4 cm.
In autumn, the larva buries itself in old foliage, creates a spider cocoon there and hibernates calmly. As soon as spring comes and the earth warms up, pests get out in the sun and begin to stock up on nutrients. To do this, they eat young green leaves, and at the same time the buds. As a result, the plant weakens greatly, no longer bears fruit and may not survive the winter, since, due to the lack of green mass, it does not accumulate sufficiently important microelements in the roots.
By the time the gooseberries stop blooming, that is, around mid to late June, the caterpillars turn into butterflies. In this form, they live for quite a long time - up to a month (many other pests fly for only a few days). During this time, they manage to lay a lot of eggs, preferring to choose the lower surface of the leaves.
After about two weeks, caterpillars hatch from the eggs, and everything starts over. They devour leaves that have survived in the spring and hide near the roots, creating a cocoon in which they can winter.
If your garden is attacked by a gooseberry moth, then measures need to be taken rather drastic:
As a preventive measure, foliage should be removed from under the gooseberry bushes in a timely manner - in the fall and early spring. It is better to burn it or send it to the compost heap - in any case, the moth will not survive.
Most often, two types of gooseberry sawfly deliver problems to gardeners:
Like other pests, caterpillars hibernate under a bush, burrowing shallowly into the ground. Pupation begins during the first spring thaws, immediately after the ground warms up. As a result, by the time the first leaves appear on the bushes, butterflies are already emerging from the pupae, laying eggs on their underside. The caterpillars take about two weeks to develop. After that, they hatch and begin to eat the young leaves.
An effective preventive measure is loosening the earth and digging in the fall. A good result is provided by timely inspection of leaves and destruction of clutches, as well as collection of eaten leaves.
If there are a lot of caterpillars, then they need to be poisoned. A special preparation sold in many country shops - "Iskra" will do. The optimal concentration is 1 g per 1 liter of water. Processing must be done before flowering, as well as after it.
Important
At the time of pollination, the drug will harm not only parasites, but also insects that carry pollen, which will leave you without a crop.
As practice shows, the fight against the sawfly and folk remedies is effective. So, chamomile infusion is well suited for the destruction of larvae.
How to cook and use chamomile against the sawfly:
Despite its name, currant glassware loves to feast on gooseberries. Caterpillars are not difficult to spot and identify due to their characteristic color: pink or whitish-yellow. Their length is about 2 cm.
Glass moths overwinter in the form of caterpillars, hiding in lignified processes. As soon as sunny days come, the air and shrubs warm up, they go outside to pupate, and by the end of spring (sometimes by the beginning of summer, if the weather is cold) they turn into butterflies.
In the winged form, the parasites do not live long and cannot arrange a suitable place for laying, therefore they simply choose peeling of the bark and other external damage to the shoots.
The hatched caterpillars eat away the buds from the inside, creating a cozy house in them. Because of this, the shoots are greatly slowed down in development, even intact buds give smaller leaves, and the berries do not please the owner of the garden with their large size.
How to eliminate pests? The procedure is not easy to find pupae or to predict when butterflies will fly out, it is almost impossible. Finding caterpillars before the buds decay is also a difficult task.
With the massive appearance of caterpillars, you have to use insecticides, treating the entire bush with them. Fortunately, the glass bowl is not immune to poisons and dies from most of them after the first spraying.
Advice
Sanitary pruning, timely removal of diseased, dried branches, reduces the risk of infection with currant glass to a minimum.
If in the spring you find suddenly reddened berries with unusual holes in them on a gooseberry, then most likely a gooseberry fire has visited your garden.
The firefly easily survives the winter in the form of a pupa, without burrowing deeply into the soil under the bush. And already in early May, when the first leaves appeared on the gooseberry, it turns into a butterfly and flies out “to hunt”. A few days later, the pest lays eggs - usually on a young ovary or in flowers. Only a week has passed, and light green caterpillars emerge from the eggs. First, they eat the ovary, and then move on to berries - gnawing through the shell, the caterpillars devour tender insides.
One larva manages to spoil about ten berries during development. But on a bush it is very rare to see only one caterpillar! In addition, they envelop the berries in cobwebs, which is why they quickly die and rot.
Getting rid of pests is pretty easy - you don't even need to use special chemicals:
Thanks to this procedure, the next year, you will most likely not encounter the gooseberry fire again.
This pest is widespread mainly in the north of our country. It is quite rare to hear that a scale insect attacked a gooseberry in the south. However, it will be useful to play it safe.
For information
Raspberry, willow, bird cherry, mountain ash, aspen, currant, even poplar can also become an object of attack by the willow scale insect!
Outwardly, the scale insect looks like a wood lice, only it has a protective brown color and is even more flattened - it is not always possible to notice it on the trunk during a cursory examination.
In winter, adult insects die - only eggs remain under the protective parental shield. Caterpillars emerge from them during gooseberry flowering, when sweet, healthy juice is most actively flowing along the trunk and shoots. It is he who is interested in pests. Having stuck around the trunk of a bush, they pierce the bark with a long, thin proboscis and calmly suck out the juice.
The plant dies from this quite rarely (only young or sick ones), but the growth rate is sharply reduced, and the yield decreases. In hot summer, the bush can also throw off the leaves much earlier than the due date due to a lack of moisture, even with abundant watering.
The fight against scale insects is usually complex in nature:
Observing these simple rules, you can provide gooseberries in your garden with a high level of safety, and yourself - a rich harvest.
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