Box Hedge losing battle with Caterpillars!

[Dr Murdoch]

I have 4 or 5 box hedges that have been ruined, continue to be ruined by Caterpillars.

Has anyone had any success with wiping these things from the planet? If so, how? Cant afford to replace all the hedging!

[anonymous-user]

RHS website has some good tips to get rid of Box tree caterpillars.

https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=760

[sak83]

I discovered caterpillars last week and a good couple of metres of my hedge has been decimated. I've since sprayed the leaves with Xentari which seems to have stopped them, its a bit too early to tell but hopefully i can save most of the plants. The hedge has been in for 4 years now after planting from root ball plants and had established nicely. I now regret going with box and should have chose another species

[pete]

I lost a large box plant this weekend to what I thought was box blight, but which I discovered when I cut it down was actually about a thousand box tree caterpillars. They seem to have reached epidemic proportions in the South East now :-(

As a precaution, I've liberally sprayed my replacement and other box bushes with Topbuxus XenTari, which is a biological agent that kills only this species of caterpillar. Reports and reviews are that it's very effective, to the extent that the box can actually start recovering within weeks if hasn't been completely stripped. It's not cheap, but easy enough to buy on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07BFDGN4N/ref...

As a test, I gave the caterpillars which are trying to escape from my green recycling bin a good spraying last night, and as of this morning they're largely dead. Good riddance!

[sak83]

Here’s one of the caterpillars responsible for eating mine...

[pete]

Exactly the same for me. There were literally hundreds of them in a box shrub that was about 3 feet tall x 2 feet diameter.

[anonymous-user]

I found a moth that looked like this:



Googled it to find out what it was, thinking it was rare or unusual...gutted to find it's a box tree moth, and the little fkers larvae are probably feeding on the front garden right now.