What mysterious horror lies beneath?

Warning: This post is not for the faint of heart.

The gardener looked at the patch of dead grass on the lawn with growing apprehension. When she first moved in, the estate was overgrown, and she figured that the brown areas would spring back to life once they had been trimmed to a reasonable length. Now, a month into her care, the patch of dead grass had grown ever so slightly larger. It was a most curious phenomenon. She knew the spot couldn't have been caused by the hound. He had a favorite place elsewhere on the grounds. No, this had to be something else.

The sky was overcast and an unseasonable chill had settled into the late afternoon. The gardener grabbed her trusty trowel, determined to find out what could be causing the unsightly area. She reached down and scratched lightly at the ground. No sign of green life could be found, even beneath the dry grass. She gave a patch a light tug and the turf peeled away like loose skin. Mystified, she pulled at another section, which came up just as easily. Her apprehension grew. What could cause such a blight? Had some strange disease affected the estate grounds? Then she saw it.

Hideous and white, it writhed in the exposed air, reaching feebly toward the sky. The gardener recoiled in horror as she saw more and more of the pale things with each patch of grass she removed. She stood and gazed upon a field of squirming horrors. With a shriek, she ran for the safety of the manor and bolted the door. It would do no good, she knew. She couldn't hide indoors forever and hope they would go away. No, they were still out there. Waiting.

I've been watching this patch of dead grass since Mr. The Gardener first mowed the lawn. I've been hoping that it would green up on its own, once it got a little rain but as you can see, this section of lawn is still very much dead.

When I got home from work tonight, I decided I was going to rake the patch and get it ready for reseeding. Just like the gardener in my story, I scratched at the dead grass, looking for signs of green poking up. "Perhaps it just needs to be raked," I thought. Instead, the patch I chose to play with came up in my hand like snatching a bad toupee off a bald man. I pulled up patch after patch and eventually discovered my hideous, Cthulhuian beasts.

This is white grub and I have perhaps the worst infestation I have ever seen. Seriously. I'm gonna have nightmares about this. I'm never going to be able to walk barefoot through the yard EVER again.

White grub is the larval stage of June bugs. You know, those freakishly large beetles that herald summer. The larvae are 1 1/2" to 2" long and look very much like the big brothers of Japanese beetle larvae, which look exactly like this but are only about 1/2" long. I have some of the Japanese beetle larvae as well, but I must have unearthed 75 or more of the June bug larvae, and I've only cleared half the patch.

The larvae feeds on organic matter, like the roots of my grass, killing off large patches. I've certainly had white grub in the garden in the past, but they've always been few enough in numbers that I could easily pick them out and squish them. This is way beyond my field of experience.

As I have no books on lawn care, I turned to my old friend, the interweb, for advice. Certainly, there are chemical alternatives for dealing with this problem and I'm gonna confess, with the number of grubs I saw in the small section I pulled up, I'm sorely tempted to nuke the yard from orbit. It may be the only way to be sure.

I'm going to give the non-carcinogenic a try first, however. Several lawn sites recommended pulling up the dead grass and exposing the soil underneath. White grub doesn't like to be dry, so they say to let the area dry out and give the local birds a chance to feast on the beasties. I wouldn't have been able to sleep tonight knowing that I had that many grubs in the ground, so I donned my +2 Gloves of Gross-Stuff-Handling and my Mastercrafted Trowel and dug up as many of the things as I could find. There is a plastic cup out on the bricks half full of grubs. I'll spare you the pictures.

I have a feeling that this is going to be quite a project. I'll keep you posted as my battle rages on.