FRENCHTOWN — Mosquitos are little bugs that can cause big problems and in Frenchtown, they've been bothering golfers at King Ranch.
“It’s a major complaint. No one wants to go out and play golf and get hit with mosquitoes all day long," King Ranch Golf Course Superintendent Andrew Leiter told MTN.
Leiter was tired of bugging out over mosquitos on the green. He's tried a variety of sprays and nothing seemed to do the trick.
“They are so bad here. It feels like we don't do anything about them, but it is something that we constantly do.”
Randomly, Leiter connected with Huson's Garden City Fungi at a meeting.
“I was at a learning class at Nine Mile and they just kind of out of nowhere, soft pitched that they had a trap," Leiter explained.
Around four years ago, Garden City Fungi's Glen Babcock and Craig Belanger discovered they could trap mosquitoes by using mycelium.
“Mushroom mycelium. It's really the base of the world,” noted Belanger. "You can clean up roadsides with mushroom mycelium. You can create CO2 for indoor gardening. There's so many things that you can do with mushroom mycelium. We're just scratching the surface."
Garden City Fungi combines the rooting network of a mushroom with sawdust in a bag with a filter to emit a lot of carbon dioxide. The CO2 attracts female mosquitoes to want to lay their eggs.
Pointing at the mosquito trap, Belanger detailed, “The CO2 will be emitted from that container. And in the morning time when the sun comes up, this pump turns on and sucks the mosquito eggs into the filter at the bottom of the pump.”
Belanger brought traps to the golf course to help out with the mosquitoes.
“We've had six of them here at King Ranch Golf Course. They'll cover, you know, a couple of acres, two or three acres.”
To Leiter, it seems like the lures are working, “Now that that's our main way of controlling massive swaths of populations, I've seen less mosquitoes."
Since 16 out of 18 holes at King Ranch are near water, Garden City Fungi is planning to add 10 more traps to the golf course in the near future.
The traps are not only for commercial use — they can be built larger to protect livestock. The traps can also be made smaller to be used in backyards.
"A couple of folks out on Blue Mountain Road and a couple of folks right on the Clark Fork in town [use them], mainly because of the diseases they carry and just inconvenience of them sitting out in your backyard," Belanger detailed.
Visit https://www.gardencityfungi.com/ for more information.
