None of the little earwig traps you might read about online have worked for me. Hand picking, avoiding giving them a home, say in wood chips lining your garden bed paths, and use of Sluggo Plus with spinosad has worked very well.
I tried inverted cans with straw atop stakes, hose lengths, cut plastic pop bottles with cat food, olive oil in cans yada yada and none of them did anything much but stink and catch a fly and a slug!

My two cents is to go with Sluggo Plus, pick and kill as you find them, and keep your garden free of wood debris as possible.

They may be homely little critters but do they really do any harm rather than just walking out of a gift dahlia bouquet at an inopportune moment?

Paghat says not:

Here is a link that might be useful: On earwigs etc.

thank you poochella for your suggestions. miss lucinda, i can't speak to what earwigs do in others gardens, but in my garden they bore holes in the buds -- which ruins the blooms. they do the same thing to my peony blooms. i know this because i've seen them exiting the holes in the blooms.

joyce

miss lucinda,

just had the chance to read your article -- there are some really good points there. so maybe i'll stick with my organic methods and move to chemicals if they don't work. i really don't have that many dahlias -- maybe a dozen or so.

if the advice in the article is to be believed, they mention an imbalance in the garden as the cause for earwig population explosions. i suspect that i probably brought these earwigs home from the nursery and because our weather has been a bit unusual, that may have caused the earwigs to misbehave.

thank you to you both for your suggestions. i appreciate both schools of thought.

joyce

There not homely, they're terrifying in appearance especially racing across a dinner table :) I only kill the ones that take up residence in an otherwise wonderful bloom. Those earwigs on the ground don't bother me as long as they eat the Sluggo or garden debris and not my flowers.

I'm hoping our current heatwave is cooking a few hundred slugs on the place too, though this year hasn't been bad for them at all.

The only year I had a proliferation of 'wigs was when I carefully placed loads of wood chips in the garden pathways. They really enjoyed all the nooks and crannies and the flowers took a beating. Not doing that again.

I just love Poochella(she used to have a profile which mentioned that she, indeed, was one of those people who cracked herself in the face by stepping on the wrong side of a gravel rake..bless her funny soul!)And, if you are reading this, you are right Poochella, they ARE more than homely.

Anywho, Jxa, I really got a reaming when I posted my earwig issue with the soil/organic/composting or whatever forum on the "imbalanced garden" issue. And, in point of fact, I had less earwigs after I followed their advice. So you just might want to do a little research there...they might tell you to get a pet frog or some such thing we wouldn't think of in this forum.

BTW, I keep hearing more and more against woodchip mulch. Along with the issue that it oftentimes is highly acidic, if you nonetheless use it, it should be swept up and away in the fall to keep from providing shelter for even more insidious and ugly creatures that the tiny earwig!

G'luck.

Lucinda

I'm getting ready to start my dahlias in pots inside for Spring planting outside for a head start. So, I'm thinking now about how to avoid the disgusting Earwig problem I had last year ... If they don't destroy the bloom, they stain it with their disgusting droppings ... I need help.

Any ideas on how to avoid this for this year?