OK guys, my tomatoes are still covered with whitefly and their small green babies that look like minute aphids. My friend, looking at them today, said she believes they also have spider mites. Her eyesight is better than mine. The NeemOil did almost nothing nor did the Seven dust or Malathion or Bug-Be-Gone. I also sprayed the garden with 1 Tbs. Epsom Salt per gallon of water and if anything, the failed peppers and infested tomatoes look worse today. Any suggestions to save our crops this year? The squash are too far gone with millions of white fly and borers. The squash crop will be removed and burned tomorrow. It's impossible to get the sprays under all the many thousands of leaves. Suggestions anyone... other than to torch the three entire gardens.
Marie Dodge;806084 Ok guys, my tomatoes are still covered with whitefly and their small green babies that look like minute aphids. My friend, looking at them today, said she believes they also have spider mites. Her eyesight is better than mine. The NeemOil did almost nothing nor did the Seven dust or Malathion or Bug-Be-Gone. I also sprayed the garden with 1 Tbs. Epsom Salt per gallon of water and if anything, the failed peppers and infested tomatoes look worse today. Any suggestions to save our crops this year? The squash are too far gone with millions of white fly and borers. The squash crop will be removed and burned tomorrow. It's impossible to get the sprays under all the many thousands of leaves. Suggestions anyone... other than to torch the three entire gardens.
sounds lilke u tried almost everything and nothing helped u :(. one thing that some of the old time gardeners used to use back when they didnt have bug powders was good old fashioned flour that u use to make bread with. try using white flour and see what happens. to what i understand the bugs ingest the flour but arent able to digest it properly and therefore eventually die off. good luck. cyaaaa, sockiescat:).
Get a different hobby. If you used that many poisons and are still infested with insects, you are not very good at gardening. Are you actually planning on eating that food after you used this level of toxins?
Not idiotic at all. If you used three of the most toxic pesticides on the market properly and you still have problems with major infestations you are not a very good gardener. That's not an insult, it seems to be factual based on what you told us here. If you are such a great gardener don't you know the reason you are getting infested with insects? An experienced gardener knows it is a problem with the soil. Address it and you will have better results. However, when people say they first went the toxic poison route, it tells me that person is probably lazy and doesn't want to hear anything other than what they want to hear.
Because I'm basically sick of people and their abuse of poisons and killing everything in sight. It's disgusting.
Then why did you answer him? Isn't that just continuing to stuff it up? I've been posting to this newsgroup since 1993 or so. I've watched it go from basically being a nozzlehead haven to people now fighting for the natural approach. Isn't that worth a little stuff now and then? This newsgroup is no longer as friendly to the poison bunch. The things, they are a changin'.
You are making a difference. I replaced the front yard grass with california native plants, including a path of dymondia and rosemary. Well the old grass wasn't done yet and sprouted abundantly because there is no mulch on the path. I tried hand weeding at first but got discouraged and asked my landscaper what to do. He suggested something called Fusilade which is an annual herbicide that supposedly doesn't harm perrenials. I even bought the stuff but after absorbing the gist of this group, and reading the label I decided to give hand weeding another go. It took a while but by concentrating on 2x2 foot squares at a time I was able to weed then entire path. The fusilade is sitting unopened in my shed. (inside a locked cargo container for those who care).
So keep it up and don't despair, you are having an effect one person at a time.
Just read an interesting (to me anyway) about chem ferts. Appears that in 1980, a ton of chem fert/acre would yield 15 to 18 tons of corn, in 1990 that was down to 5 to 10 tons/acre. So it turns out that as long as there was organic material to be mined from the soil, chem ferts looked good. Once the organics are gone, the magic leaves as well. Not to mention the top soil, water quality, air quality, biological diversity . . .
That was another interesting point. Apparently, ag scientists are always creating new resistant plants because the critters always find away around the plant's defenses (especialy when people insist on planting thousands of acres of the same crop in the same place, year after year, after year). Any who, ag scientists need to trot out a new and improved version every seven years. Where do these wonder genes come from? (TA DA) Biodiversity. The very thing that we have lost 75% of in the last hundred years. In southern Mexico, in a logged out forest, by accident, a cousin of the teosinte plant was discovered. Which easily hybridizes with corn but is resistant to all corn viruses. Corn is the number two-o grain crop in the world. This previously unknown plant may allow us to go on eating. Or it could have gone the way of many life forms in the tropic, destroyed before it was even noticed. Some of these biomes are only a few acres.
So yeah. Chem ferts are killing the planet, GMOs don't out produce natural plants, and in their rush to concentrate wealth, companies, like Monsanto, are destroying bio-diversity.
Not that whacked out foresters don't do there bit by strip cutting forests and replanting a monoculture of harvestable trees and call it restoration (except without the diversity).
To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
- Theodore Roosevelt Seventh State of the Union (1907-12-03)
That's a lovely story. It's so easy to take out the chemical help, and sometimes in the case of bermuda grass it may be the only way to go. The point is, the "dousing" is coming to a close and people are being more responsible.
Oh Molly...what a gal. When Air America first went on the air down here in Austin, Al Franken did that first show from the State Theater and we waited on line starting at 3am to get in. One of his guests was Molly Ivans. I loved her name for our current governor, "Rick 'Good Hair' Perry." She looked so thin and sick when we saw her and I saw the writing on the wall, then not long after she died.
I guess the issue of ignorant people can get me pretty pissed off. I wish for and aspire to react without anger, but I have not mastered that concept yet! I'm better than I was.
My new thing is people who are aways aghast at bad language. Who the f*ck are they kidding? White tower syndrome I suppose.
re-reading this, the above isn't fair to my landscaper, who is a respected california native plant expert and who is I'm sure sensitive to the herbicide use issue. I specifically asked him for suggestions on herbicides and he responded. I didn't give him the chance to suggest hand weeding.
"The number of people out there today seriously worried about the health of all the plants and seeds on which modern agriculture depends must be very limited, and the number of people actively campaigning to protect them vanishingly few. ... Of the Earth's 250,000 plant species, only 200 are cultivated for food on any serious scale."
"Even more extraordinary, the vast majority of the world's food comes from just 20 crops, in just eight plant families. Most of these monocultures are dangerously vulnerable to diseases (both old and new), pest infestations, and a rapidly changing climate."
"Yet the "genetic pool" on which plant breeders might need to draw to build resistance and adaptability is being constantly eroded as older, non-commercial varieties disappear. ..."
"[S]eed banks can only do so much in this massive salvage operation. The seeds they store need to regularly germinated, otherwise they too die. The best way of maintaining an active and vibrant seed bank is to ensure that farmers (and gardeners) are planting out those 'land races' and rare varieties of plants which are now so endangered."
"More often than not, that sets small-scale, subsistence farmers (on whom this kind of "active conservation" depends) in conflict with the juggernaut of industrialised, intensive agriculture.""
~~Jonathan Porritt, founder and director of Forum for the Future, in the Nov. 7, 2007 edition of BBC News
I would suggest that you thoroughly wash the bugs off with a soapy water spray and regularly continue doing that for the rest of the season. You're crops may be significantly reduced this year, but I doubt if you will loose the lot. It's what makes gardening so challenging!
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