Episode 1674: seg 3 of S10E35 guest John Libs The Gardening with Joey and Holly Radio Show

0:00Welcome back to the Guardian with Join Holly Radio show moments away co-founder of Beetlegon.com and Gripgon.com. John Lips will be with us. But first, you got dirty hands. Raise your hand if you got dirty hands. Don't raise your hand if you're driving. If you got dirty hands, scrubbysoap.com has the solution for you. What is a scrubby you ask? It's a natural soap with a scrubber inside. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. What is a scrubby? Is a scrubby natural soap with a scrubber inside? Try it now. Yeah, go ahead. What is a scrubby? A scrubby is a natural soap with a scrubber inside that fills the entire size of the bar. So rather than using harsh synthetic chemicals, cleaning agents, they use citrus oil. So it's combination of the citrus oil and the scrubber. It's all natural, like we've talked about. By grace, the ultimate soap for moving dirt grease oil and paint. So it's not just for your hands, but it's a superior product for cleaning artist paint brushes.

1:04Scrubbies for everybody, whether it be artist paint or gardener mechanic for your kitchen, fishing chefs, etc. removes paint oil, grease and grime. If you go to scrubbysoap.com and use the code soap, you can get 10% off your order. Hello, let's go to the hotline and bring in our guest for this week. John Libs is the CEO and co-founder of Beetlegon and Grubgon and has a background in biological science. Welcome to the program, John. Yeah, thanks, Holly. How you doing? We are doing well just to be completely transparent with our audience. John is co-founder of Beetlegon.com and Grubgon.com, a sponsor of multiple years of the program. We appreciate that support. And can you explain a phylum bio product, which is the parent company and how it can benefit homeowners and gardeners? Yeah, sure. So phylum bio products was originally founded and still true to form. We were founded to discover and develop non-chemical pesticides.

2:05That was our forte, our expertise. So we engaged some pretty broad discovery programs where you're kind of mining biology, but in nature, so to speak, to find new active ingredients that are again, or our Mother Nature-based, organic-based, meaning made up of carbon hydrogen and nitrogen, and not from the lab or chemistry-based. And we discovered a few leads and they looked really, really good and early testing. So we took those forward through quite a bit more testing and field trials and production work until we got to the point now where we have multiple products in the market, non-chemical insecticides specifically, and they can be very well against chemicals. Fantastic. So you were on the program in spring and March and you gave us some great information on how to,

3:08you know, do yard prep and garden prep then. What can we do now that falls fast upon us and to be prepared for spring in the best way? What do you bet? Yeah. So in the spring, that's when folks are obviously starting to think about their lawns and gardens and temperature starts warming up. Ground soil starts warming up and that's when folks who have had beetle problems in the past and more specifically grubs in their lawns, they start thinking, oh boy, here we go. This year again, I'm going to be battling these grubs. There's a larvae of beetles, weevils as well, other like bill bugs in lawns. And so our grub-gum product specifically we developed for homeowners to use in their lawns to help control those beetle grubs and other types of lawn pest larvae. So carrying it forward now, that same product works well all the way through the season.

4:11And as you prepare to get ready for the fall, if you had a beetle problem over the summer or you've had grubs last year and didn't treat, chances are you may have grubs in the ground that are growing at this time, there'll be more right out of egg hatch over the last two to three weeks, kind of late summer. It's another generation that's hatching out and they'll grow very rapidly through the fall, through September and if it's kind of a temperate climate all the way into November. And they have a big appetite, they'll go after and be a big problem in lawns, late in the season. And then unfortunately, if you still haven't gotten rid of them, they're going to overwinter deeper in the soil profile and then they'll pop back up next spring and be a home-to-proble next year. So what we recommend folks do is put down some product for grub control now

5:12to help cut down the numbers, heading into winter. So there's less grubs next spring that pop up and become a problem. And there's a couple of specific details regarding products, sort of what I call the darling in the market now, the chemical type that's in for homeowners, the grub-X product. That chemical is very insoluble. So it takes a long time for it, relatively long time for it to work down into the soil profile where the grubs are feeding. So if you put it out late in the season like now, chances are it's not going to work its way down to affect the grub numbers like it normally would in the spring, but really not a good product to use now. Our product works very well at this point in time. It's really the place that most folks like our landscapers or proside guys use it, kind of starting in late July early August, all the way through the fall to control not only the first newly-hast first-installed grubs,

6:14but even as they grow into what we call second-in-starr and third-in-stored grubs, which are the ones that overwinter. And then the counterpart beetle gun, which most folks use for foliar spray to control beetles, adult beetles, and protect their veggies or fruit trees or fruit vines, grapes, all different berries, all different types of ornamental plants, roses and trees as well, like linen trees. You can also spray that on the ground, either in lawns or in your gardens in the soil. You can also take the product as a dried powder. It's a wettable powder that you mix in water and spray. This is beetle gun. You can also use the dry product if you want to and chill it into your garden soil to kill the grubs at this time. Both products work well all the way through the fall, right to the time that winter rolls around. It's a good product and that's a good way to prep for the winter.

7:19Is there a better time to switch to a non-chemical product? Some people will think, oh, I got to wait in a certain time, but what is a better time to switch to organic product or a non-chemical product? What are your thoughts on that? When there's a good organic product or non-chemical to replace the chemical counterparts. That's a short answer. A lot of the products out there, whether they're the chemistry or the non-chemistry, a lot of them are not new technologies. They're sort of rebranded retreads of old active ingredients. That's not to say that they don't work. Some of them do. The unfortunate thing is a lot of the non-chemical products that have been in the market for years. They have a spotty performance record over a long period of time.

8:19We call our direct competitors, the ones that are non-chemicals out. We can compete against directly and those would be nematodes or milky spore, the oils. They all have a place, but the time point at which you can use them and the outcome level of performance that you can expect is going to be lower. While the time that you, it's just a narrow window of using those where you're going to be satisfied. Nematodes, they're getting a little better with the strains they've discovered. Going backwards a number of years, you had to have the perfect timing, the perfect amount of water to spray, otherwise they would die. They wouldn't work very well. They were very, let's say touchy, finicky to use and to make work. Folks, you had to really, really spend a lot of time trying to get it to work well. Those products are getting a little better, newer strains. Milky spore takes many years of build up, three years they market, a build up of the spores to work.

9:29The oils are really hitting myths and that's really the direct competitors. But what I tend to really focus on, let's say, pitch to people, and I've done this more and more so with homeowners, more non-professional folks, is really think about using integrated test management. And that's IPM. It's a really good way to control different types of pests, including insects. And what it involves is using a mix of different products that each have their pros and cons. Our competes very well against the chemicals. It outperforms all the direct competitors that I just mentioned. The problem with our product is more expensive than the chemical products. It's probably double. It competes on price with Milky spore about the same price as Neem and Toads.

10:31But if people are used to using the chemical, they're just more expensive. All the non-chemicals are more expensive except the oils. But then the oils don't work well. But what you can do is if you're if you're cost conscious and you're afraid to move away from the chemistry that's working very well, what our type of product does very, very well. And this is a really well known feature of our type of product in industry worldwide and agriculture. And you can mix our type of product with all different types of other products, including chemistry. So what we do is if you're having a really bad time with turqurubs, let's say, or you have a lot of land that you want to cover and non-chemical products, just too darn expensive to do that, you can use our product at half the low labor rate.

11:33The low end three pounds per thousand square foot spread application rate, that's typical. And the chemistry chemical products like any of the midoclopers are bare advanced with fertilizer or grubbecks. There are about three pounds of spread per thousand square feet on the low rate. You can use half of each of those products mixed together. So you're still spreading the three pounds per thousand square feet. But what you're doing is you're obviously cutting the chemical load in the environment by half by using only half the low rate of that product. And you're also using half the low rate of our product. Therefore, you're ramping the cost down as compared to using our product for the entire application. And guess what? It turns out you get 100% kill of turqurubs. If the only combination we tested our products with chemistries at half label rates, where you actually get 100% kill.

12:39You don't get 100% kill with any of the products spread by themselves. So that's IPM. You can bring the best of all these different products together and get a better outcome. And sometimes you can even save money. And just so happens our product can be used with all the direct competitors. You can mix our stuff with mimes, with milk, he's for with oils, and you may get a bump in performance out of any of these mixes. So that that's what I recommend. And that's when you can figure out that sort of mix or if there's a non chemical product that's really known to be performing bona fide way well and compete against chemicals. That's a great time to switch from the chemicals to the non chemical or organic products. Well, we've really enjoyed having you on the program and with all the great information about the bill, the owner group gone, how can people find out more about you or find your great product?

13:47Yeah, you can go to belegon.com and you'll see some information about our products there. We are now selling through Arbaco and AM Leonard. We just we just organized a bunch of information with Arbaco on their website. So it's a very broad amount of information there for all the products. We're doing the same with AM Leonard Sunday. Sunday they have information and and are tried and true distributor Joe Maghazie out at Green Earth Ag and turf in Connecticut. He's he's very well known out in the eastern seaboard knows non chemical products very, very well. And he loves to talk about them like I do. So he's a he's a world of knowledge in this field. So he's a really good source of information as well. Well, John, we thank you. We thank you for coming on the program and your sponsorship and the information you shared with Holly myself and all of our listeners. We thank you for your time.

14:49Yeah, thank you to you. Thanks for letting me bend your ears. I appreciate that. Absolutely.