Have you ever had a problem with earwicks? These are a bug that really gave me nightmares as a kid.

I remember just looking at them with their three quarter inch long bodies, so they're pretty big,

and they have these pincher-like fourcepts at the back of their body. Looks kind of alien,

looks kind of menacing, and that name Earwig really gave me the mental image of it

crawling into my ear and eating my brain or something like that.

Fortunately that's not what they do, but they do eat your plants or they can. Now earwigs aren't a classic pest in that they only do

damage. They do some good things to your garden as well. In fact, they are prolific eaters of aphids. They will eat the eggs of

other insects. They will eat many soft-bodied insects. And so having some in your

garden is actually a good thing, but having too many can be bad because they are omnivorous and they will eat tender young seedlings, they'll eat corn, they'll eat a bunch of different things. Now let's talk about how to prevent and

control them. Prevention is really mostly about just removing the

environment that they like to live in.

So they like to live in a damp, dark, and protected area.

So I hear that and I think mulch sources. I think the understory of low-lying ground cover style plants. I think even the

debris of our gardens. So if you can remove some of those around your

sensitive plants that's going to be a really good way to cut down on their shelter.

Now you can also make sure that your soil isn't overly moist.

That's always going to be a good thing that's going to be a good thing for your plants in general.

But when it comes to control, there are two foolproof methods to cutting down on your earwig

population that I think you really will enjoy.

Now the first one is to use an oil trap. What I like to do so I'm not

wasting anything extra is I eat these wild sardines and they come in this little

rectangular tin so I just save some of the oil at the bottom of those.

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