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Wireworms are bright orange brown and slow moving and
around 3cm long. They are sometimes mistaken for the much faster moving
centipede. The centipede is a friend, the wireworm is not!
Wireworms eat the root system of most plants and are also
a pest of potato crop where they bore into the tuber.
They are the larvae of the Click Beetle - itself a
relatively harmless insect. The wireworm larvae takes around three years
to become an adult, and during that time feeds underground.
There is no chemical control available to the amateur,
so normal cultivation methods of digging and hoeing will bring the
wireworms to view, where they can be picked off and destroyed. |