SKIP GrubEx - It's A Waste Of Time & Money (Usually)

the month of June is the most common time of the year to put down grub control these are the products that we put down to prevent grubs from infesting our lawns in the fall and the spring and arguably the most common product that homeowners and yard owners put on The Lawns to prevent grubs is Scott's grub X and I want to tell you why you may be making an enormous mistake during the month of June adult female grubs burrow deep into the ground to lay their eggs this usually happens somewhere around the 15th of June mid-june on average you can expect baby grub larva to start emerging from those eggs two weeks later somewhere around the first of July so in an ideal environment which is impossible to achieve in real life every single grub larva would hatch on July 1st and start eating in those first couple days of July this is when they would be the easiest to kill so if we apply a product to the surface of our lawn on July 1st trying to kill off that larva no matter what the product is it's not going to do anything until the product gets from the surface of our line deep into the soil where the larvae are actually living grub X is a granular product when we spread it on the lawn with our granular spreaders it goes onto the dirt even if there are baby grub larvae living below the soil surface they're not going to die because of this product until this product is able to push through that upper inch or two of soil to get down to them it is a death by contact product when the larva come in contact to the chlorine triniloprol which is the active ingredient in grub X that's when they die grubs don't come to the surface they only live down below it so the only way to get this product down to the grob larva is to water it in the problem problem with chlorine frenuloprol is that it's not water soluble now it doesn't bind to soil particles so it will eventually move down but no matter how heavy you water the lawn you're not really going to be pushing it down into the larva living Zone like where they live is not going to happen very fast so in the month of June when most people are going out to their local Big Box store buying Scott's grub X and spreading it on their lawn it takes a long time for this product to actually get into the root zone of our grass where the grub larva are living by the time it actually gets down there if you're applying this in mid-june it might not be getting down into the uh the Kill Zone until early August and heaven forbid you put this down somewhere around July it's not going to be getting down into the Kill Zone until mid to late August at that point many of those grubs will have matured to the point where this product won't kill them off the optimal time time of the year to apply Scott's grub X or any product using chlorine trinidilaprol as its active ingredient is in may possibly even late April even if you apply this early into the egg laying Zone into that larva Zone and it won't degrade enough over time to not work you can apply this a little bit early but you can't apply it late that is literally the biggest mistake that almost everyone who applies this product does they apply it too late and I understand the bag says that you can apply this all the way into July but it's just not the advisable thing to do you're applying it late in the season you are wasting your time and your money I've made that mistake myself on my own line and I even have a video from a couple years ago where I made the mistake in saying that this could be applied all the way to late June the first of July if you're going to apply this apply it at the correct time of year if it's actually actually mid to late June and you're considering putting down grub preventative product this should not be one of your options you should be looking into something using Imidacloprid which I don't usually advise aside from a few sets of circumstances I don't advise because it's not very good for all of the beneficial insects that live in our Lawns and our in our environments and communities you're going to find imedacloprid and a number of products I have this lawn grub control from Ike's company I think you can buy this at Walmart but it also comes in a very popular product from bioadvance it's their bio Advanced lawn grub control I think is all it's called imodacoprid is water soluble so once you put it on the lawn and then you water it in it's literally going to go down into the root Zone into the Kill Zone with the water very quickly and it's also going to persist in the launch so if you apply it a little bit early say for instance early to mid-june it's still going to be active in working throughout the month of July when the grub larva are feasting down below it's actually going to give you one of the best kill rates for existing grubs and you may actually get some extra benefits in applying this because this will kill off many forms of termites and carpenter ants kind of those wood eating pests if they're living in the dirt under your lawn most people that I advise use this product tend to have very bad infestations of wine grubs they've had a significant amount of damage throughout the fall and the spring where they're seeing lots of beetles in the months of May and June if you've got a very bad problem you can get it under control quickly with an imadakliprid product before moving into one of the safer products for regular annual use in the lawn Imidacloprid products are going to be also helpful if you're getting into the grub control Spirit come early July because they're water soluble you can get them into the line and they'll go to work right away whereas this won't now what I've done for a handful of years now is I use a natural natural grub control where I apply a strain of bacteria bacillus thuringien Genesis it's a specific strain of bacteria that goes into the soil it's bacteria so it kind of moves through the soil of cell itself although you are going to water it in pretty heavily because it has a very short lifespan in the soil this larvae find the bacteria and they literally eat it and it's toxic to them and them alone meaning every other bug mammal and person walking through your yard even if they come in contact with this particular bacteria it does no harm to them it's going to have the least kill rate or the smallest kill rate of all of these three options and it's going to have the shortest duration of Effectiveness in the line but I've as I've said on this channel for many years now healthy Lawns have grubs in them the point is not to eliminate grubs from the uh the ecosystem here the point is to prevent infestations should be able to dig down under your lawn and find some grubs you just don't want an excessive number of them so when I use this BT this bacillus thuringiensis product on the lawn it's going to kill enough grubs that I'm never going to have to worry about an infestation but it's not going to kill them all especially because of the window of activity if I apply this to the lawn it starts working immediately so long as I water it in but after about 14 days about 90 percent of the product has stopped working the bacteria kind of dies off so to speak so for this product this is what you're literally only going to be putting down in the summer in the early parts of July I've applied this as late as the 15th to 20th of July although if I was to do it in the perfect setting I'd probably put the entire dose down somewhere around July 10th I have an entire video about applying Road control products BT specifically in July I invite you to watch that next because that gives you more context as to why I this is right for the majority of yard owners

Channel: Turf Mechanic

Views: 16,608

Keywords: grass, lawncare, gardening, lawnmower, lawn mower, lawn care, thatch

Id: bzn623m8qMU

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023