Garden Pests and Diseases: Rolly thingy bugs........, 1 by Night_Bloom

Night_Bloom wrote:
Just my two cents, for what it's worth. In most cases that I've heard of, rolly-pollies don't do much harm to plants. As the link you gave said, they may eat live plants, but that is generally in times of moisture stress and as far as I have seen it's pretty rare. They much seem to prefer to eat decomposing material. The main problems they cause are in vegetable gardens when fruits are left directly on the ground - i.e. tomatoes, squashes, cucmbers etc, because this tends to soften them like rotted material. Generally for me, mulch under the fruits and veggies did the tirck.

Two years ago, it was a very damp year and I had tons of these critters in my gardens. I watched them carefully (Yes, I'm weird that way - I love the bugs and bug-like critters. It's what I do). One day I watched while about six to ten of them ate a dead flower head off of one of my flowers. I checked the next day, and they hadn't touched the live parts. I didn't have to dead head practically any of the flowers in that garden that year - hee - yay for me. They also ate the old, dead leaves off of some of my Swiss chard that I neglected. This year has been cool and the weeds have been merciless and tiny - thus much hoeing, so less cover and less rolly-pollies for me. Back to dead-heading and picking off the yellowed leaves.