This topic contains 1 reply, has 2 voices, and was last updated by charles 12 years, 7 months ago.
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Sorry to hear of this problem, I wnder if your potatoes were the first vegetable after grass? This is the usual scenario as wireworms live in some pastures, coexisting with grass and other weeds, then have nothing to eat when soil is suddenly bare. So they eat vegetable roots, but tmostly die out within a year because there is relatively so little to eat, especially if you are on top of weeds. I suspect that you may suffer a little damage next year, without digging, but nothing too troublesome.
The "general advice" you quote is, I think, wrong because even if your digging happened to expose all the wirewom larvae, extremely unlikely in itself, you are also exposing worms, beetles and other beneficial soil inhabitants, as well as soil mycorrhizae and other fungi which are extremely beneficial to growing roots. They are killed by exposure to oxygen and, I think, light, as well as their threads being physicallly broken by cultivation.
General advice has a lot to answer for as much of it is based on I don’t know what, yet has become accepted as the way to proceed! Digging is a good example.
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