Sod Webworm Damage in Houston Lawns

How to Spot Signs of Sod Webworm Damage in Your Houston Area Lawn

How can you tell if you have sod webworm damage or damage from chinch bugs?  Michael Romine explains what to look for in this video.  Michael is the owner of Houston Grass South — delivering Houston’s top quality grass sod.  Call us at 281-431-7441.

Summary of the Sod Webworm Damage Video

– – [Michael Romine] – here we’re in, we’ve moved locations to try to find some active sod webworms, so you could get an idea about where they live. As you can see, we’re here in the middle of the day, and when these things are exposed, they curl up, their tell-tale sign is they curl up in this C. You can kind of see, see the worm right here, and then he’s laying in this stuff right here, that’s their excrement and they’re …

You can’t see them, but I see several more of these little worms moving around back behind this. This area right here is the affected area, you can see it’s a little bit yellowed off, and you see the jagged tips of the grass and whatnot. It’s not a real big area and there’s probably not a whole lot of worms in this area, but what will happen is a couple of worms do this damage, and couple more do it over here, and all of a sudden these things are intersecting, and if you have a lot of worms, it can really knock an area out in a big hurry.

These worms are, a few of them don’t hurt much, and especially if you’ve got grass that’s out in the sun. If you have grass, especially newly planted grass in a shady area of some kind, they can be a real big problem, because they’ll eat all the leaf tissue that’s gathering sunlight off and there’s nothing to gather sunlight and the grass, it’ll disappear in hurry. Just wanted to show some of the slight damage, and see if we could find some of the sod webworms here, that’s what we have.

Sod Webworm Damage Can Look Like a Weed-Eater Hit Your Lawn

Here we just wanted to show a little bit closer shot of the damage that these things cause. As you can see, people equate it to, they wake up one morning and it looks like somebody, the yard will be kind of an off colored brown. Obviously this yard, they did their damage about six weeks ago, so this isn’t a great example, but it’s the only one I had for right now.

They come in and it looks like somebody hit it with a weed-eater, cause you’ll see it’s jagged, definitely doesn’t look like a mower hit it. You’ll see these jagged looking leaves where they eat, they eat down to where it gets tough, so basically they eat the good, young, tender stuff off the top and then they leave it, so, it looks like a weed eater ran over it. You’ll see here some new growth starting to come out of those shoots, but, because this is a shaded area, it’s really tough for the grass to make a come back.

There’s not much leaf tissue exposed, they eat the good leaf tissue that’s collecting sunlight, they eat it off and the grass can’t do it’s photosynthesis thing and it will end up looking like this. This yards definitely going to have to be replaced. Just wanted to give you an idea about what kind of damage these things can do, They’re pretty tough, so you need to be vigilant, for sure.

We Carry Products to Kill Sod Webworms

At Houston Grass South, we have several products that will kill the sod webworms in your lawn.  If you prefer a liquid insecticide that you can apply with a hose, we have Cyonara and it’s very effective.  We also have Nitro-Phos Bug Out Max, which is a granular insecticide that you’d apply with a spreader and then water into your lawn.  Both products work well, but you might need to reapply them several times during the growing season to prevent sod webworms from moving back to your lawn.

If you have questions, please call our office at 281-431-7441.  We’re located in Arcola, just off Highway 6 and a few miles east of Sienna Plantation.

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