Suburban gardener and the deathly stinkbugs

After a couple of years of neglect, I have resurrected the veggie garden. So far that’s going okay although I need to buy some bird netting because the birds have already harvested our blueberries and no doubt will go after the strawberries and tomatoes once they are ripe.


Our orange tree is in a separate part of the garden so doesn’t get much attention. On the weekend I noticed several orange coloured bugs on it. I looked them up on the internet and discovered they were bronze orange bugs, also known as stink bugs because of the smelly substance they secrete. These bugs can do a lot of damage to a citrus tree and needed to be dealt with swiftly. As you can see from the picture below, the orange tree has already copped a fair bit of damage.

There are a number of ways to get rid of bronze orange bugs, the most organic apparently being to knock them with a stick into a bucket of methylated spirits or hot water. Hubby was keen to try the vacuum cleaner method but I didn’t fancy having smelly bugs stuck in the Electrolux. So this morning, after heavy rain last night, I donned my PPE (Personal Protective Gear – apparently the stuff they spray out can stain clothes and cause a burning sensation on skin, especially in the eye) and went out to do battle.

I didn’t have any metho and I didn’t want to mess around with hot water (especially as I had a leaky bucket) so I put half a litre of cleaning vinegar in my bucket. I put on an old top, rubber gloves, wrapped an old towel round my hair (to stop insects getting in it), put sunglasses over the top of my spectacles and armed myself with a bit of plastic curtain rail. Fortunately there was no one around to take a photo.

The ‘knock them into a bucket’ method didn’t work. Bronze orange bugs cling on and although they aren’t fast, they move around the branches and hide under leaves. So I gave up on that idea and went in search of the best gardening tool ever – the grabber. The grabber is actually a kids toy like this one but it’s perfect for plucking bugs off plants. Works well for snails too, especially if you’re squeamish like me and don’t want to use fingers (have also discovered that snails don’t last long in vinegar either).

So with my grabber and using my wand (stick) – 11 inches, Eucalypt and dog hair – to manoeuvre small branches out of the way, I managed to get about 20 bugs and half a dozen snails. I don’t know why they are called stink bugs though, I couldn’t smell anything. I did see one squirt something when I went to grab it but it only sprayed a few inches. Most of the orange bronze bugs were at the middle stage (orange) but I also got a fewer immature nymphs (green).