How To Control And Prevent Box Tree Moths And Caterpillars

I'm going to show you how you can use one of these to protect these boxes here from these and these. I'm Jeanette, I'm the Enthusiastic Gardener and I'm going to show you how to deal with this so you don't lose your box plants. Now of course in an ideal world all our gardens look as beautiful as these ones do. The sun shines, the birds sing, the bees buzz, the roses are blooming, everything's wonderful but if you have any of these box plants that you've lovingly spent years, and it does take years, training them into beautiful topiaries, lovingly cut them every year into stunning designs and beautiful shapes and lovely hedges, but there is something in the garden to beware of. You are going to have to be on the lookout for these, the Box Tree Moth, Pseidolema perspectalis. They've come over to the UK accidentally from Southeast Asia and the caterpillars and the larvae of the moth feed on our box plants. They lay pale yellow flat eggs on the underside of the leaves and the caterpillars have dark brown stripes, thick black and thin white stripes down their body and they've got black dots outlined in white. And so the caterpillars, they feed and eat these leaves and they can leave the box plants disfigured. With severe loss of leaves they can defoliate the plants completely and of course these box plants are then unable to recover. So we need to take action to protect the plants before the visible caterpillar feeding appears and that is expected April to October. The RHS have done a survey and they would like to know where the moths have been seen so you can go on their website which is the rhs.co.uk they ask you to fill out the survey form. Now last summer I planted all these box plants as you can see, cost me a fortune and a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money, putting them all in, straightening them all up, measured them, everything. However last summer I noticed they were all bitten, chewed, I didn't know what it was so I googled, I thought it was box blight but it turns out it wasn't box blight, it was box moth caterpillar. As you can see it's now March and they're just beginning to get some green, new green growth on which is really encouraging. I managed to get the box moths in time obviously. I'm just going to give each plant a quick burst of water just to make sure there's no eggs that have already been laid that might be hiding in amongst all the leaves so I'm going to go through and do that to every plant right now. Now I'm fairly confident I've given them a good a good burst of the hose. If there were any eggs, which I don't think there are this time of year because apparently the moths start in April so it's March still so I'm doing it in good time but if there are any then we've got rid of them. Now I'm going to take you inside, show you what to do with the moth trap. So this is the sort of thing you can buy, it comes like this in a box like this, it's called the Buxa Trap Box Tree Moth, Buxa Trap Moth Tree, Buxa Trap Box Moth, Buxa Trap, Buxa Trap Moth Tree Moth Trap, it's a bit of a tongue twister but anyway you can get them in lots of different places, you can get them on eBay, you can get them on Amazon, you can get them from lots of garden centres and anywhere online will sell them. They come in all different prices, I've seen them for as low as about £13 and they do go up to something like £23. They come with two of these inside and this is enough to last six weeks so that comes with it and then you can buy the refill separately. I put a note on my phone to remind me to change it every six weeks and that is what I would suggest that you do. So all you do, open it up and you will find a syringe inside and then you will get one milliliter of this liquid. It's a pheromone trap so it traps the mailbox tree moths inside. So you remove the syringe from the sachet, you take off the cap of the syringe and you syringe half of the liquid into the first basket. Let me show you, so this comes off and you just syringe half of the liquid into here. The liquid is not runny so it's not going to run out. So I've put half of the liquid in there, I hope you can see that, put the lid back on then you put this into the top like that, press it down nice and firm so it clicks and then there's a second cap here so we just put the rest of the syringe in this cap, exactly the same sort of thing, put the lid on this one, remember we're going to really wash our hands after all this and then you can see right inside there there's a little hole which this clips onto there. So we've got some in here, in here this one and we've got some in this one up the top. We clip it all down together and just lock it into place. So now this is ready to hang up, so this pheromone will attract the male moths into there, they'll fall down this hole, they'll get caught by the one inside the basket. Last year I managed to catch probably about 50 moths and I didn't start doing it right at the beginning of the season either, my boxers plants had already been got at. So we're just hanging there, hopefully that will do the trick and I'll put in my phone a diarise for when I need to do it again, I actually need to order some more because I've used both sachets now so I will get on and order some more and that's it really. I'm Jeanette, I'm The Enthusiastic Gardener, please subscribe to my channel if you haven't already done so and thank you so much to the people who have, thank you.