Protecting your garden against uninvited guests can be a challenge. Stink bugs are no doubt unwelcome visitors in anyone 's garden. They subsist on fruit and foliage, both of which you no doubt are most likely harvesting in your garden. Ever since these critters first made landfall on US soil, having been brought over here as stowaways from southeast Asia aboard a cargo vessel sometime in the late 1990s, they have proven to be a nuisance for American households and have proven to be a huge economic threat to American farmers, whose crops are increasingly coming under attack from these bugs.
Stink bugs are harmless to humans but are wreaking havoc on the American agricultural industry. So if you are growing a garden in your backyard, it would be wise for you to acknowledge that the threat to any fruits that you grow is very real. These bugs will flock to wherever they can find fruit. They will pierce the skin of the fruit and start sucking the juice out of it from the inside, thus destroying it, rendering it inedible by humans. You can tell if a stink bug has partaken of a particular piece of fruit by examining the surface of the skin for any piercings and any discoloration around those piercings.
So what can you do to protect your garden against an infestation of stink bugs (or to get rid of those bugs who have already managed to invade your garden)?
…show more content…
Use row covers to protect your fruit-bearing plants. They are essentially a type of blanket or net that you encase your plants in. These nets are impermeable to stink bugs yet still allow rain and sunlight to get through. They also offer benefits to your plants, in that they help to trap heat, similar to the manner in which a typical greenhouse might. This is a relatively inexpensive and is no doubt the least toxic form of pest control. You can always pull the row covers back as needed, when you need to get to your plants, whether to harvest their fruits, to extricate them, or to plant new ones in the same