Bug tweezers

[garage nut]

As you might have gathered by now, I just love potting around in my hothouse and in summer I also have a small raised bed where I try and raise some beets, potatoes, onions and carrots. Bases on the howling disastes of my onions of the last season needless to say I have no onions in the ground.

My potatoes seem to be a bit more of a success than last season. But when I inspected the plants (only 10 of them) I found them covered with fairly large spiny bugs.



A quick search on the net revealed they are "Stink Bugs" and a real problem as the suck the juice from the plant and kill them in that way.

The solution....

1) Poison spray....not an option for me as I try and grow organic, otherwise what is the point of growing your own vegies.
2) Build a trap...to slow for me as it feels like they are sitting on me when I know they are sitting on my plants.

My solution... a huge bamboo tweezer. I have some ornamental bamboo that grows in my garden. The larger shoots I cut off and dry to use as supports for my tomato plants, but back to the tweezer.

I simply drilled 2 holes right next to a "joint" and the cut the bits out to form a crude tweezer, Then with a bit of filing the tips were formed to be big and flat enough to catch the BIG bugs and squash the small ones. The big one were also sent to bug heaven in a humane way.



If anybody has a better/easier solution to rid my plants of these bugs I would be very happy to give it a try.

I think I will also use these to hold nuts on hard to reach places or a screw in a very narrow gap.