Pepper saga.......... Pepper expert anyone?

Marie Dodge · 2008-08-11T03:47:55+00:00

I've already mentioned the problems with our Bell peppers this year. Whitefly and spider mite but these may not be the whole problem. I've look online and can't find these symptoms anywhere. These peppers came from three different places, some I stared myself last spring. Within a week of planting them out their leaves looked "strange." Instead of being smooth and flat, they started to look like seer-sucker, kind of 'puckery' and the plants failed to make normal growth. As the weeks passed they made buds but all flowers and buds fell off along with the bottom leaves. Leaves were still green when they fell. Now over a month later I'm seeing small yellow spots with dark brown centers and leaves are curling upward slightly. It's getting paler between the veins. The plants are tall, spindly, leaves are sparse and only a handful of peppers were produced from 18 plants. In the past few weeks the spider mites and whitefly infested them completely and every spray I used failed to make a difference. Ideas anyone? Thoughts? Suggestions? What disease can this be?By this time other years we'd have so many peppers we'd be giving them away - and from no more than 6 to 10 plants.

M

Marie Dodge 18 years ago

Why? Because I ask questions after taking people's advice here and the products recommended no working? Why can't you accept the truth? Why should people keep going out and buying one product after the other when none worked before? Your ignorance is really surprising since the nymphs of these insects cannot be "washed off" like bits of mud or leaf litter.

So non-toxic common soap kills them dead but no one knows this but a few people on Usenet? If soap killed silverleaf-whitefly and 2-spot spider mite dead, it would be well known all over the world by now. Thee two pests alone do millions of dollars worth of damage every year, both in the USA and SA. But no one but a few people here know soap kills them?

To use enough pressure to dislodge the nymphs of WF and SMs will itself damage the leaves, shred them if not knock them off the plants completely. So tell them..... how much soap is used per gallon? At sundown I used a new sprayer and sprayed the plants with 1 TBS per gallon soap and 1 TBS per gallon flour as per one of the people here. All the WF and SP should be dead and gone in the morning according to you. You claim the soap will kill them dead whereas the nothing else did. We'll see.

Soap is cheap. I soaked the plants completely, top and bottom of the all leaves the spray wand reached - right down to the ground.

farmers are losing millions of dollars a year to WF and SP by refusing to use Soap to kill them. Neem Oil is also supposed to kill them. Maybe I'll learn why they're not using that either but rather take great losses.

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Marie Dodge 18 years ago

Well I sprayed all three gardens with Soap and flour as suggested here. I had nothng to lose since these products were in my home and are both cheap. We'll see if soap killed them.... in fact I'm taking the flashlight out there now and looking.

OK... the plants were sprayed around 7 PM with 1 TBS each of flour and handsoap (Palmolive) per gallon of water in a brand new sprayer with a larger tip. Both sides of the leaves were sprayed. Sprayed were collards, jewel peppers, chard, tomatoes and a Ichabon eggplant. Only the Chard had spider mites and only a few plants are infested so far. The WF and SMs are still there and are alive. I could see them moving, walking over the residue of soap and flour when disturbed. They will not fly at night. They had 6 hours now to suffocate and die. The flour was supposed to somehow kill them also. The whole garden smells faintly of soap but I guess that's better than the Organicide which smelled like fish and didn't kill/smother them either. I'm just wondering what will be said next.... that it's the wrong brand of flour, the wrong kind of soap, wrong brand of soap and flour, wrong aroma, constancy of soap.....? I'm sure you can see my point. The second garden is now being destroyed by these pests and so far nothing had worked. Not one of you purely Organic people have explained why the Neem Oil, the Phyrethrum and the Organicide didn't do them any harm either. What's left to recommend now? How many more organic options are left?

I can't try it on wasps since we don't have any here at the moment. But since the soap and flour didn't kill the WF and SMs, I would have to be out of my mind to toss it on wasps. You really need to tell people to try it on insects not dangerous to themselves before recommending they toss it on wasps. When it fails to kill the wasps as it did the WF and SMs, and the person is stung, they can go into shock and die.

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M

Marie Dodge 18 years ago

Do you know what chemicals are in your soap there? The soap here in the USA doesn't kill them. I used Palmolive at the recommended dose. After 7 hours the SMs and WF are still there and still alive.

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Isabella Woodhouse 18 years ago

What a person of your level of resourcefulness needs, Marie, is a grenade launcher, flame thrower and an ample supply of napalm. Or perhaps photon torpedoes launched from the belly of Ferrengi pirate ship. Only cost you 50 quatloos.

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Marie Dodge 18 years ago

Isabella BS snip.

As of 7 PM tonight the plants sprayed with Palmolive soap and flour are still covered with the mites and whitefly - 24 hours after a thorough drenching. Leaves have slightly oily feel and flour is visible in crevices of leaves. Only difference noticed: The smell of the soap had dissipated.

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J

jellybean stonerfish 18 years ago

Flour? I don't ever remember suggesting flour. Sounds messy.

Ok, so you have some time and a flashlight. Wash the few plants with mites. Then do it again the next night. I don't know what the flour will do, except make things messy.

I don't know what to tell you. It seems like the bugs are your enemy. In your other post, where you mention birds, it sounds like they are your enemy too. Maybe you should go with astro-turf.

Be afraid, be very afraid.....

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phorbin 18 years ago

Who said soap and flour?

And how did you manage to spray a nozzle clogging soap and flour mixture, anyway?

Soap, has worked for us on the rare occasion we've needed it.

As for wasps and bees... Bees, you leave alone for obvious reasons except when there's a hive in an inconvenient place because bee hives keep growing. Wasps, you leave alone because they're predators and __pollinators__ and most helpful with cabbage worms etc. except when their hive or nesting site is in a very inconvenient place.

...and with wasps, if you're persistent, a jet of water will knock down and destroy most nests and they'll give up and build elsewhere. Yellow jackets underground.

This isn't something I'd recommend, but I've removed wasp nests by just scraping them off or out with my Japanese farmer's knife.

Finally, with wasps, leaving a good sized, dead, nest in place may keep other wasps from building. I left one beautiful, complete, paper wasp nest inside our garden shed and they've not tried to build anything in there in the past couple of years.

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Isabella Woodhouse 18 years ago

Some wasps are pollinators, aren't they? You kind of have to stay away from certain plants at certain times of the day. Black-eyed peas are a good example. Ours are always full of wasps in the morning. Gosh I hate getting stung by a wasp. It's an awful feeling unlike anything else. I have often accidentally reached for a bumblebee when picking blackberries but at least they start to rumble and buzz as you reach out to touch them. None have yet stung me. They are amazingly soft to the touch... lol. My husband ran over a wasp nest with the tractor and they stung the hell out him. The kind that nests in the ground is rather vicious.

Isabella

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Isabella Woodhouse 18 years ago

Like I said, what a person of your level of resourcefulness needs, Marie, is a grenade launcher, flame thrower and an ample supply of napalm. Even then, it seems unlikely that would work on on such a contaminated, blighted, befouled, soon-to-be designated by the EPA, toxic waste dump like yours.

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