Do wireworms eat germinated seeds?

Question

My garden seeds did not come up this year and in the past I had problems with wireworms.

Would wire worms or sow bugs destroy germinated seeds that did not come up through the soil? None of the seeds I planted came up through the soil.

Answer 1

Wireworms do impact germination rates on common vegetables, but I doubt that they'd prevent an entire planting from coming up - and you'd need a ton of them to affect a garden. Read here: https://hort.uwex.edu/articles/wireworms/. Sowbugs usually feed on dead or dying plant matter; if they eat living plants they leave holes in the leaves like slugs.

It's far more likely that environmental or other conditions caused your garden to fail. A couple questions:

• What vegetables (or non-vegetables) did you plant?
• How do you know that the seeds germinated underground?
• Is this the garden's first year? If so, was there a lawn there before? If so, did someone spread pre-emergent herbicides on it before you made it into a garden?
• Are you in a drought?
• Were the seeds you planted viable? If you planted heirloom plants, were the seeds gathered last year or how many years ago? Do you know if the seeds were ripe when collected? If you planted commercially purchased seeds, when did you purchase them?
• Have the temperatures been normal for your area this spring or have they been much higher than normal? Lettuce won't germinate if the temperature gets too hot, for example.
• Did you get a large rain event - something like four or more inches in a day?

Lots of variables go into a garden, of course - it's best to rule out the environmental ones before looking at pests.