Photos courtesy of the Wine Enthusiast - Article about vineyard pests in Australia
Vineyard Pests
When I came across an article about Australian vineyard pests in Wine Enthusiast, I was struck and humored by the uncommonness of North American pests our “down under” friends have to put up with.
They may seem cute, but they are still pests, i.e., they cause damage to the vines and grapes.
Reflecting on this, pests in vineyards of the mammalian, insecta, or avian groups vary by wine-growing regions. However, several common pests exist regardless of the location—especially in my vineyard!
For example, at the end of my first year of vineyard growth, I installed a 7-foot-tall fence encircling the vineyard to protect it from deer, elk, and other four-legged creatures. The following spring, I found the fence did nothing to restrict prairie dogs and rabbits.
As discussed in one of my blogs chronicling the new fence and options for deterring pests, installing three-foot-high, one-inch mesh chicken wire did the trick.
Additional common furry vineyard pests my vineyard doesn’t suffer from, which a fence layered with chicken wire doesn’t restrict include squirrels and raccoons. They just climb over.
Another group of pests keen on the vineyard are yellow jackets, earwigs, grasshoppers, and caterpillars. Grasshoppers and caterpillars go after the leaves, and yellow jackets and earwigs go after the grapes.
There are all sorts of chemical and organic deterrents for this group of pests. Always leaning towards natural biological approaches of the organic kind, I used traps and diatomaceous earth (DE) as control measures. By the way, DE is a compound that wreaks havoc on the digestive systems of insects, resulting in eventual death.
Traps are, well, traps!
DE is not a contact killer, and by the time I deployed the yellow jacket traps in late summer, it was too late. As covered in several 2023 summer blog posts, the yellow jackets caused the more significant damage. They destroyed a portion of the 2023 grape harvest.
Queens in their nests kept delivering workers no matter the number caught and killed.
For 2024, I deployed a “must kill the queens” strategy, deploying traps at the beginning of spring when the over-wintered queens first exist the nests in search of food. The traps captured three dozen queens.
So far, so good. We’ll see how things progress as the grapes take on sugar in the coming weeks.
I also installed netting in 2023 to protect the grapes from birds. However, no birds took an interest.
Maybe the yellow jackets were a deterrent?
Undoubtedly, additional pests will likely crash the scene before the 2024 growing season ends. This is why the old proverb, “The best fertilizer is the growers’ footprint in the vineyard,” is the best deterrent of all!
When I came across an article about Australian vineyard pests in Wine Enthusiast, I was struck and humored by the uncommonness of North American pests our “down under” friends have to put up with.
They may seem cute, but they are still pests, i.e., they cause damage to the vines and grapes.
Reflecting on this, pests in vineyards of the mammalian, insecta, or avian groups vary by wine-growing regions. However, several common pests exist regardless of the location—especially in my vineyard!
For example, at the end of my first year of vineyard growth, I installed a 7-foot-tall fence encircling the vineyard to protect it from deer, elk, and other four-legged creatures. The following spring, I found the fence did nothing to restrict prairie dogs and rabbits.
As discussed in one of my blogs chronicling the new fence and options for deterring pests, installing three-foot-high, one-inch mesh chicken wire did the trick.
Additional common furry vineyard pests my vineyard doesn’t suffer from, which a fence layered with chicken wire doesn’t restrict include squirrels and raccoons. They just climb over.
Another group of pests keen on the vineyard are yellow jackets, earwigs, grasshoppers, and caterpillars. Grasshoppers and caterpillars go after the leaves, and yellow jackets and earwigs go after the grapes.
There are all sorts of chemical and organic deterrents for this group of pests. Always leaning towards natural biological approaches of the organic kind, I used traps and diatomaceous earth (DE) as control measures. By the way, DE is a compound that wreaks havoc on the digestive systems of insects, resulting in eventual death.
Traps are, well, traps!
DE is not a contact killer, and by the time I deployed the yellow jacket traps in late summer, it was too late. As covered in several 2023 summer blog posts, the yellow jackets caused the more significant damage. They destroyed a portion of the 2023 grape harvest.
Queens in their nests kept delivering workers no matter the number caught and killed.
For 2024, I deployed a “must kill the queens” strategy, deploying traps at the beginning of spring when the over-wintered queens first exist the nests in search of food. The traps captured three dozen queens.
So far, so good. We’ll see how things progress as the grapes take on sugar in the coming weeks.
I also installed netting in 2023 to protect the grapes from birds. However, no birds took an interest.
Maybe the yellow jackets were a deterrent?
Undoubtedly, additional pests will likely crash the scene before the 2024 growing season ends. This is why the old proverb, “The best fertilizer is the growers’ footprint in the vineyard,” is the best deterrent of all!