Ruud Kleinpaste: Green, stinking vegetable bugs

I live a sheltered life! Ever since moving to Christchurch a few insect “pests” have disappeared from my life and my garden: the Passionvine hopper and the Green, stinking vegetable bug (Nezara viridula)
This last character is always the one that makes gardeners excited… Just look at my diary notes on talkback callers!
Green vegie bugs are sap sucking insects that arrived in NZ a long, long time ago. Their tactics are simple: stick the proboscis into plant material with lots of veins and transport tubes that are full of minerals and sugars, and you are basically mainlining your journey to adulthood.
Removal of these nutritious plant foods causes deficiency symptoms: yellowing and browning, leafcurl and dieback; Muckin’ around with hypodermic needles and veins allows these bugs to become very competent vectors of all sorts of diseases and viruses and that could be the bugs big effect on plants: disease transmission!
These bugs go through an interesting life-cycle, starting as young black buglets and showing different colours after every moult: some yellow bits appear and some red bits too, but generally speaking they get more and more green with every “instar”
Great hosts for the green vegetable bugs are beans, corn, tomatoes, sunflower and a pretty ornamental called Cleome.
They don’t seem to like “smelly” crops like onions, shallots and garlic, leeks and lavender. Smelly competition is not their gig.
The world of insects is a “chemical world”; most of these invertebrates are really good at picking up smells and chemical deposits and exudates from plants and - indeed – mates! They know their environment through their noses, which are often the antennae or feelers.
With Green vegetable bugs, we can use that smell detection prowess in a clever way to “control” them on our plants:
1) Get out in a cool morning and locate he buggers
2) Squash a few between thumb and fore-fingers. The Coriander-like smell will become quite noticeable (wear a Covid face mask??)
3) Keep your eyes peeled: some of the nearby bugs are getting nervous: there’s obviously some mean “predator” nearby squashing their friends and whanau!!! Help!!!
4) The neighbours drop off the plants onto the soil (in the hope that predator doesn’t see them)
5) Squash those cowards too – smell increases remarkably.
6) More come jumping down… keep squashing
7) Etc etc – It’ll take perhaps ten minutes to literally reduce the bug population by 80 or 90 %
Using the flowers of sunflowers and Cleome increases your control efficacy big time: these plants are “trap crops”, attracting the bugs in large numbers;
So: start off with the 1 to 7 list on Sunflowers and Cleome and you’ll be on a winning streak.
Oh and despite the faint resemblance to the smell of Coriander, I cannot recommend using the half-dead bugs in your stir-fry Indonesian meal!

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