An Unpleasant Surprise In Vermilion

On Aug. 5, 1940, farmers in the Vermilion area woke up to a beautiful summer morning. Then, everything turned sour when they looked outside.

Farmers discovered millions of beet web worms on the march throughout the district, rapidly stripping gardens bare. When farmers went to bed the night before, they had lush gardens. When they woke up the next day, they found their gardens were empty of everything.

While the farmers were surprised, they shouldn’t have been. There was a warning the day before that the web worm was approaching the community. On Aug. 9, the Edmonton Bulletin reported,

“A plague of beet web worms is approaching Vermilion from the west. It was reported yesterday they had attached the beets in the hospital garden. Today’s report is that they have finished the beets and are attacking the carrots.”

At the school of agriculture, dozens of phone calls came in after the worms appeared and farmers asked how to deal with them.

The beet web work resembles a caterpillar, and they can appear suddenly, to the great surprise of farmers and gardeners. The agricultural college told those who called in that to combat against the beet web worms, poison could be used, along with trenching. Putting a deep furrow around the garden, especially on the side where the web worms enter, was the best option for dealing with the pests. The ground had to be turned away from the garden, as the web worms spun webs as they crawled and could bridge the furrow. Hence, why poison was recommended at the time as another means of defence.

All of this was well and good, but many of the farmers had lost much of their gardens already to the pests. It was late in the season, and would be hard to grow something else in the garden before the autumn arrived.

Vermilion wasn’t the only place that was hurt by the beet web worms. In Gadsby, about an hour to the south of Vermilion, was also hit by the pests.

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