- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
If you have house or office plants and have ever seen small, dark-colored insect swarming around them, your plants could have fungus gnats.
Fungus gnats are tiny flies that as adults, resemble mosquitoes. Fungus gnats don't bite people, but their presence can be annoying. Their larval stage lives in wet, overly moist potting mix, where they feed on decaying matter.
The first step to managing fungus gnats is allowing the soil in your houseplants to dry out in between watering. To read more about how to manage this pest, visit the UC IPM publication Pest Notes: Fungus Gnats.
Proposed New Mediterranean Fruit Fly Quarantine Boundary - Solano County
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
I've had a few calls about raccoons recently; reports ranging from them getting into trash cans at night, to even a report of one coming through a friend's open kitchen window and licking the butter dish!!
Raccoon sightings are not new to residential areas. While they normally live in natural habitats, they can easily adapt and survive in urban settings where they may damage garden plants, knock over garbage cans or compost piles, and eat backyard fruits, nuts and vegetables.
Problems in and around the home can also occur when female raccoons look for nesting sites. They can cause damage by ripping off shingles and other structural features when trying to get into the attic or underneath decks. Odors and other issues may...
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
If you've noticed some odd-looking bugs in your garden or landscape recently, you might be seeing leaffooted bugs. These medium to large sized insects feed on tomatoes, pomegrantes, and certain nuts and ornamental plants.
Adult females can lay over 200 eggs during a two-month period during spring. The eggs hatch and the nymphs emerge and can be found together with the adults. During spring and summer, there can be two to three generations of leaffooted bugs in your landscape!
In spring, leaffooted plant bugs often feed on thistles and other weeds. When fruits start to ripen, adults migrate into gardens and landscapes and can be found feeding on tomatoes, pomegranates, and citrus as well as ornamental shrubs.
In...
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
If you are like me, you try to park your car under a tree in parking lots and on the street for some shade, especially with the hot weather we've had lately. Maybe you choose to park under a big hackberry tree, but when you return to your car, you notice droplets on your windshield and sticky stuff on the sidewalk, other cars, and the parking lot. What is this?
The sticky substance is called honeydew. The honeydew is excreted by a number of sap-sucking insects such as aphids, whiteflies, mealybugs, certain scale insects, and few others. On hackberry trees (widely planted in some cities), an insect called the woolly hackberry aphid produces a large amount of honeydew which drips from the leaves onto surfaces below.
If you...