Kitchen Concoctions for the Nibbling Bugs

Has anyone had success with home-made pesticides? I'd like to know if a blend of hot pepper/garlic/mustard/ powder in solution can protect my broccoli leaves from nibblers.

Thanks, Greg Toronto Zone 5

Reply to
Greg Miller
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I don't know. I think it would be worth a try.

I know two things that *do* work on cabbage worms (which are most likely what's eating your broccoli leaves).

  1. Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) - this is commercially available as a spray which selectively targets caterpillars and paralyzes them, "so they die from starvation. Crop damage stops almost immediately. Affects only targeted insects. Use up to time of harvest on cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, collards, turnips, tomatoes, and more."

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Covering your veggies carefully with floating row cover or nylon net. GardensAlive also sells floating row cover (they call it 'Superlight Insect Barrier') and nylon net is sold at fabric stores and discount stores such as Wal-Mart. In this case, since you already have the worms, you'd obviously need to make sure you get rid of them all before you cover the plants.

(BTW, I have no connection whatever with GardensAlive.com, except that of a customer. These products are both sold by many, many other online companies and possibly in large garden centers too.)

I routinely use floating row cover or nylon net on brassicas (cabbage-family crops) as they are all terribly susceptible to cabbage worm damage otherwise.

Good luck! I just hate those cabbage butterflies, hate them, hate them! They're white and quite small - if you see white butterflies, that's probably them. There's also some species of moth that lays eggs that develop into worms that eat the cabbage-family plants, but they are nocturnal so you aren't as apt to see them.

Pat

Reply to
pat

Have you tried their new spinosad product? Bull's Eye, I think they call it. I used the Monterey Garden's version of it this year to help control the thrips on my tomatoes. I alternated the spinosad with Neem early in the season, then used just Neem.

And I *did* have better luck with tomatoes this year. Almost all of them are gone by now, though. The tomato spotted wilt virus carried by the thrips got them in the end. I have one Andrew Raghart Red that is still struggling, and one Brandywine that's still spitting out tomatoes. I pulled a few very small green tomatoes off the last of the Stupice vines and performed a mercy killing on what was left. And I have one yellow current tomato buried in the lemon basil that ran amok still popping out tomatoes.

At the peak of the season, back in July, I was picking baskets of tomatoes almost every day, so I still consider this season a success. This is the first season in about 4 or 5 that I had a decent tomato crop.

You know, I see cabbage butterflies all the time, but I've grown brussel sprouts for years and never had a problem with them. The one year I tried broccoli, though, they munched everything I had!

Good thing I like brussel sprouts.

Penelope

Reply to
Penelope Periwinkle

No, I haven't tried it yet. Thanks for the recommendation - although I usually don't have any problem with tomatoes until mid-to-late September -- and our first frost is the first week in October, so that's not bad.

I've read that late blight came early this year to the eastern USA and Canada (because of having such a cool, wet summer). I believe it.

All my tomatoes have succumbed to it now: however, a few seemingly totally dead plants are still producing ripe tomatoes. Our first ripe tomato was June 8* (spectacularly early, as our last frost this year was June 4). So June 8 - September 1, that's a reasonably long time.

We live in the mountains in northern Pennsylvania and our summer nights are often very cool, often down into the 40s, sometimes into the 30s even in mid-summer. Tomatoes don't flourish in those temperatures. We're hoping to get a hoophouse built this autumn so next year I'll be growing tomatoes (also peppers, eggplants, melon, sweet potatoes) under plastic.

They're the only vegetable I don't like. Nasty little things, they are (IMHO, of course).

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  • Yes, the spectacularly early tomato was open-pollinated, and yes, I saved seeds. The variety is Glacier, I bought the seeds at Fedco.

One Glacier plant was clearly faster than the others at every stage of development, and this is the one that had a ripe tomato June 8. This plant is still hanging in there - appearing totally dead - but with a few ripe tomatoes still on the vine.

I will *not* be distributing seeds from it at present: I want to grow it out next summer to be sure that the characteristics are hereditary. If they are, I'll have plenty of seeds two years from now.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Glacier for an early tomato. The tomatoes are about the size of golf-balls, with good taste for an early variety, and the plant is a fairly small determinate. The spectacularly early Glacier is in a container on our deck, a pot about 20" across and 20" deep. That size container is adequate for Glacier.

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Pat

Reply to
pat

how about bunnies?

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Reply to
Robert La Ferla

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