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Hello Adam
With Decis, surely that has to make contact with the pest to have any effect on them ?? (harder with box caterpillar as they hide down the stems and pop up to eat the fresh growth)
Have had success with Xentari (from Amazon) and the top buxus health mix (from TopBuxus) combination together in Sunny Salisbury!
Xentari in 3L of water and 3 top buxus health mix tabs (1per Litre).
Have 2 gardens also with the box mox traps out to collect up the males, but on the whole the Xentari and health mix tab applied every two weeks has worked fine. The trouble is those bothered/interested in saving and keeping their old box are fine, the other gardens where they are not bothered the box bushes now just look a mess and they are happy to leave them looking like that.
your bushes should recover with some TLC
Xentari contains a protein which the caterpillars ingests when nibbling the leaves and disrupts their gut so they stop feeding after a couple of days. You can see it works as can normally search in a bush and see the black dead bodies lurking in the webs
Though box are shallow rooted they do benefit from a water every now and then in dry periods, you can see the leaf tips go orange when they are suffering from drought. Can all apply some Vitax buxus...... all depends on what people are prepared to pay out and spend on keeping them looking good
+1 for XenTari. The bushes recovered but it took a couple of months. That was last year and they've been afflicted again. Apparently you can use as a preventative April June and Sept so we'll try that next year.
Sympathy! We also are under attack by Box blight and Box moth with some sites having the same plants attacked by both pests . Never seen anything like it in 40 years. The speed of spread is astonishing, on a site yesterday that is maintained weekly, no sign of either 7 days ago now at least 30% of plants affected. We have been using a spray mix of Vitax Q4 foliar feed, Fungus clear ultima 2 and Bug clear ultra 2 every 7 days for the last 2 weeks amd it does seem to be controlling the spread of both. The climatic conditions are not helping the blight situation. I do wonder if Box has a long term future, yes there are alternatives but they are not there in my opinion.
The other issue we have as we are primarily commercial is getting across to site managers with zero horticultural knowledge the devastating consequences of these pests all they see is an unbudgeted cost for treatment.
Thank you Gents, Xentari is on order. I used the Decis because it was on the shelf....and claimed to be effective on the caterpillers.
Fingers crossed we can get these ancient plants looking good again.
We use decis every week/ fortnight and top buxus feed /tonic every four weeks with perfect results.
Good luck
THank you Olliver
Run an estate with lots of box, we used Xentari for an initial treatment but not cost effective as we have 1000sm2 of hedges/topiary
Weve moved onto Dipel DF through a knapsack sprayer (2g per 1litre) and so far we have no more damage- spraying every 4 weeks as a precaution ( from the start if this season) if they come back we will look at alternating between Dipel DF & Hallmark Zeon
Lots of BTCM in my area. I use decis as a preventative once or twice per year, & where there's an infestation retreat roughly every 6 weeks.
important to use good quality sprayer to really penetrate to insides of the bush.
combined with TopBuxus works great.. I've also combined with fungicide, depending on the need.
haven't tried xentari, but see lots of positive feedback for that too
Out first sighting if it this year was early May..
I used to use Zentari, which is very expensive imo. Then Brucco from Progreen which is now DIPEL DF, active ingrediant Bacillus thuringiensis. The same as zentari) I start treating April, depending on the client & spray fortnightly. Even with this treatment this year there has still been a few outbreaks of the little critters. Maybe I had missed a patch or two but I'm pretty sure they are becoming resistant. I hope not!! Clients have to realise it is cheaper to spray regularly than to replace. One client has 2x 30M hedges plus numerous balls/ shapes. So a lot of spray & a lot of clipping next week as well. I charge Dipel out @ £1.50 per litre, which I think when I worked it out a few years ago was about half the price of zentari. Dipel is £55 for 500g
They are absolutely everywhere this year. Even in some gardens I work in that have never had it before that I hoped were free. I am constantly, constantly spraying Xentari at great expense as i don't seem to be stopping them in the tracks or disrupting the life cycle. I spray, and it does work, they die. Then a week later I see more patches appear. Whereas in years past I have only needed to spray a couple of times to keep them at bay. I have put the pheromone traps out with no success so far after a month. I am amazed garden centers are still selling it and people buying box. It is nothing but trouble as much as I like it for topiary. Yew all the way going forward
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