Battling the Basil Bugs

Everybody who gardens battles bugs at some point. Every time I have grown basil the plants have been severely stressed by the annual influx of Japanese beetles. The attack started in earnest this past week. Whenever I would walk by my basil plant I would "kick" it with my foot and 15-20 Japanese beetles would come flying out from within and on the top leaves. Fortunately, they are not hard to get off the plant but they come right back.

Japanese beetles eat the flesh of the basil leaves leaving a "skeleton" of the leaf behind. Using scissors this morning I cut off all the worst examples but you can see a few holes in some of the leaves in the pictures below.

The beetles are only active (it seems) from morning to late afternoon. So I decided yesterday that this morning I would cover the basil plant with netting to see if that would keep the little buggers at bay. Before they arrived this morning I covered the plant with tulle (wedding veil material) which I use for a variety of purposes (dust covers, water filters, etc.). It appears to be working -- before I even returned inside a JB showed up for breakfast and was relegated to sitting on top of the tulle and not gaining access to the basil leaves. I went back out a while later and he was gone. I simply draped the tulle over the top of the plant and tucked it in around the base of the trunk.