Some of the reasons I don't spray pesticides ...

Every spring I notice at least one or two colonies of bumble bees living in the garden. They do a fabulous job of pollinating in the early spring, long before the other pollinators appear. They feast on the Pulmonaria and Vinca from early April on, and then get busy with the myriad, sweet-smelling blooms of the wild black currant in mid-month. No blooms in the garden wants for their attention all season long.

A big clump of ladybugs hibernated somewhere at the base of the plum tree. They marched out one sunny spring morning and got right to it. Their children and grandchildren have been controlling the aphids, not just on the fruit trees and the roses, but in most of the garden as well.

I grow an abundance of flowers for bees and butterflies on the sunny south facing slope ... and if you grow them, they will come. The Monarchs are starting to show up now, fluttering among the echinacea and the butterfly bushes. Sometimes, in the fall, I see them swarming overhead before they head south across the lake.

I leave the seed heads in the wildflower slope up for the winter. By early spring, all the seeds have been eaten by local birds and the hungry migrants returning from places I'd rather be.

EV

Reply to
EV
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EV in news: snipped-for-privacy@nospam.me:

yes, keep them hungry and they'll eat anything. but keep them away from those cherries when close to rpiening, or they'll leave you none.

:-)

Reply to
Gardñ

that's beautiful. thank you.

Reply to
<bluesalyxx

Yes it is. But EV doesn't have a hedge full of yellow jackets and an allergic wife - I do :-).

I've tried traps and spray cans - Orkin is getting called Monday.

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

First off, I'm curious, does Orkin come out after midnight? Because if the nest is assaulted in the daylight hours, most of the wasps won't be in it, & it will take ghastly amounts of extra-poisonous toxins sprayed more places than just the nest to get rid of them, & if there is ever going to be a good chance of anyone getting stung by generally-innocuous wasps, it will be while the Orkin dude is screwing around the nest.

Yellowjackets are gardeners' friends, as they eat garden-chomping insects. A single yellow-jacket nest in a garden will be cleaning out aphids, leafhoppers, beetle larvae, flies, & all manner of garden-munchers at a fantastic rate. They also disperse trillium seeds, which imitate a meat or insect odor that causes yellowjackets to cart away the seeds & drop them elsewhere when they figure out it isn't meat.

Paperwasps abandon their nest after a single use, so their nesting presence is temporary. If it WERE necessary to move one it could be wrapped in plastic at night & carted away, as none of the colony will be outside the nest at night; poisoning would not be necessary.

I've known many people who had serious even life-threatening allergies to bees or wasps, but none thought the best way to deal with it was to poison the garden & inevitably their pets, their kids, themselves, & all the beneficial insects in the vicinity. My grampa had a bee allergy sufficient that he kept a kit handy in case he was stung, but that didn't keep great-grampa from keeping honeybees, & while my life overlapped grampa's, he was never stung that I knew of & never had to use the kit.

Wasps don't have to be nesting in the garden to be in the garden; you'd have to poison all the surrounding yards if their mere presence incited such a phobia. The best way to deal with them is personal calmness. You could offer wasps a greasy chunck of fried chicken & let them crawl all over your hand in great numbers & the happy little buggers would never sting you (they might accidentally nibble you if your fingers are greasy enough to be mistaken for the meat). You could brush them off your shoulder or off your sandwich with the back of your hand & they wouldn't sting, though they might dart over your hand to get back on the sandwich.

At a recent lakefront gathering for a Golden Anniversary party, the primary picnic area had a large colony of ground-wasps nearby. Grandkids & great-grandkids of all ages were running around; people were eating shitloads of meat; & the wasps were truly a nuisance trying to get their share of the food. But even with a dozen rowdy kids running about, & everyone's hands shooing wasps away from food, not one person was stung, & the only complaint became that meat-eaters had to go indoors to finish their meals in peace. I'd frankly still like to get rid of that particular nest if meat was going to be eaten around there regularly, but it would never be an allergy issue because those critters wouldn't even sting the kids who were testing the limits of wasp docility.

They're not highly aggressive. I have lived around yellow jacket nests for half a century & have never been stung by a paperwasp or ground yellowjacket. I was once stung by a mud-dobber, but that was because I leaned against it by accident & it was trying to get loose; mud-dobber wasps ordinarily won't sting under any circumstance, their stinger being for hunting much more than defense; they don't even defend their little mud-nests. As a kid I once laid down under a swarm after a paperwasp nest had had rocks chucked at it. Several of us kids lay perfectly still & watched the swarm. At their angriest still it was a cinch not to got stung.

Ground-dwelling & paper-nest wasps are only aggressive when their nests are mucked with, so the best way to deal with them is by marking the location noticeably & giving them some space. Nearly all wasp attacks are the fault of people attacking the nest, even with freezing aerosols & pesticides the wasps can still manage to be defensive as death is not instantaneous. When their nest isn't mucked with, they're very easy to live with.

There are two understandable reasons to not tolerate a nest; allergy is not one of them since there'll still be plenty of wasps from elsewhere nearby. But if a paper nest is built right outside the door, the mere opening & closing of the door could make the colony feel threatened, so it would have to be zapped at night with freeze-spray, wrapped in plastic, & taken away (we had one on our front porch for a season however & the wasps were so little trouble we failed to notice the papernest on the ceiling until after the season was over & the nest was abandoned). The second reason they might not be tolerated is for nesting right by a bar-b-cue or picnic site. Although not apt to sting they can be so happy about all the meat people are bringing to them that they will descend dozens at a time onto every picnic plate & make it hard to eat in peace. If becoming vegetarian isn't an option, then the picnic-site nest won't be very tolerable.

But if one is lucky enough to have a nest in a corner of the garden where one needn't be digging, or high in a tree where the colony is never threatened, it should be cause for thanks, as they are assisting the garden every minute they are active.

-paghat the ratgirl

Reply to
paghat

I don't know what part of the planet you live in, but in the Midwest here, the yellow jackets can sometimes be a big problem. Haven't seen many this year, but previously, they went after my peaches. I had one good sting when I tried to pick up a fallen peach on the ground, and it took a lot of antihistamine to quiet that one down.

EV also doesn't seem to be growing fruit, or she would not be so complacent about apple maggots, plum curcullio's, etc. The only time I stop spraying is when the blossoms are out, since I don't want to kill my pollinators (bees).

Sherw> >

Reply to
sherwindu

More & more orchards are going organic. Clearly your love-affair with deadly toxins all over your fruit isn't necessary, so yr just foolin' yourself to adhere to slogans of the 1950s when DDT was heralded as the savior of the planet. One of the things the organic orchards encourage is a healthy wasp population, & don't worry too much that wasps do also feed on fruit that has already fallen to the ground & burst open. It's true, though, that chemical-dependent non-organic gardens so screw up the balance in their orchards that they end up with MORE harmful insects & thus need MORE toxic chemicals.

A study conducted by Washington State University from 1994 to 1999, & reported in NATURE & elsewhere, showed conclusively that orchard productivity was greater in organic farms than for those which depended on pesticides & other chemicals. Furthermore, in taste tests for the organic & non-organic, the organic fruits were the hands-down winners.

In the WSU studies, the organic group did not use synthetic pesticides or fertilizer, but made use of organic compost, mulch, pheromone-mating disruption of harmful insects, Bacillus thuringiensis, & hand-thinning of fruit. The non-organic farms used a conventional array of synthetic fertilizers & pesticides (inclusive of herbicides) & chemical fruit thinners.

The study concluded that organic orchards ranked #1 for environmental AND economic sustainability. Larger crops sold for more money from the organic farmers; the non-organic farmers not only ended up with smaller & inferior harvests that earned them less money, but they had higher costs from all those ghastly chemicals.

A similar study on organic vineyards was conducted by Cornell University. One of their organic techniques (to control harmful insects) was to maximize the population of predatory wasps. Similar studies in Vermont corn crops, & Idaho potato crops, found organic methods of pest control completely effective. Yet another WSU study of pear orchards found that harmful insects in the orchard were controlable by not mowing the surrounding fields so often, as vibrant meadows were attractive habitats for such beneficial insects as, ahem, wasps.

As a wonderful bonus, the organic farmers all report that insect pests become fewer year by year -- whyich is not true for the chemical-reliant planet-poisoners.

That's just the science conducted in the field with real orchards, not one person freaked out about wasps & convinced the wasps will get all their fruit if the poisons are insufficient.

So when I hear someone claiming the wasps are so horrid they have no choice but to poison their orchards, then pretending that stopping for a couple weeks while there are flowers is all it takes to not harm bees, I don't give them much credibility.

This is also why "conventional" chemical-reliant orchards are selling out & letting their land be carved up for development, but ORGANIC orchards are the fastest growing segment segment of US, Canadian, & European agriculture.

So to paraphrase you, I don't know where on the planet yhou've been, but not in a healthy orchard lately. And thanks for the warning that you harvest your peaches off the ground -- that'd make yours one of the e-coli orchards besides toxic as all hell!

-paghat the ratgirl

Reply to
paghat

I knew I'd get at least one anti-pesticide fanatic :-).

I'm more concerned about the antibiotic-resistant bacteria we're breeding with all the "antibacterial" products on the market today than I am about killing a few thousand insects - there's no shortage.

And industry spews pesticides into the air constantly - unfortunately the pests are us.

IOW, there's a lot more important things to worry about - and I didn't even mention politics :-).

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

Medical issues unrelated to gardening are important but less important for On Topic discussion here.

As for no shortage of beneficial insects, you need to update your knowledge on the pollinator population in North America, the alarming decline of both wild & domestic bee populations, the extinctions of butterflies, to the point that in large wild expanses native plants are having trouble fruiting & reproducing, while in some suburban settings, due mainly to pesticides, pollinators are frequently too few for garden fruit production to occur at all.

And it turns out the the only insects for which there is not now nor ever will be a shortage are the harmful ones that are all that remain when predator insects & pollinator insects are eradicated. And it just never had to happen, since all the field studies show that correct organic principles have better outcomes for gardening & fruit production.

Though as you imply, it is also true the coming world-wide tuberculosis outbreak is going to make any concern about deadly agricultural practices, extinction of all wildlife & destruction of forests & waterways, & unhealthy gardens, all appear rather inconsequentle if most of us start coughing up bits of our lungs & gasping to death. Then again, it was our misguided belief that we could pick & choose what on the planet was permitted to continue to exist that pretty much guarantees we won't exist.

-paghat the ratgirl

Reply to
paghat

Hey Rat Girl, I am sorry I don't belong to your church of the organics. I have visited organic orchards, and see a lot of spoiled fruit on the ground. I have tried organic sprays, and from my experience, they don't work. I loose very little fruit to insect damage. There is no good organic spray for Apple Maggot, etc. The organic sprays are a pain

to use. For example, Surround leaves an ugly film on the fruit, which would make insect damage almost preferable. Organic sprays and other preventatives have a long way to go to get me to use them. Having a small backyard orchard, I value ALL of my fruit, and am not willing to sacrifice a good portion of it on the alter of organics.

Sherw> >

And plenty of them are going out of business.

You are in a dream world if you think the helpful insects can stop these pests. These wasps do not go after my fallen fruit, as I do a good job of cleaning that up. They punch holes in the fruit on the tree, and go at it.

I don't believe it. I personally know organic orchards where they loose a good portion of their fruit.

How can pesticides effect the taste of the fruit? On the contrary, some organic orchards are limiting their selection of fruit to varieties with more resistance to pests and fungicides. However, these varieties are not the very best tasting of those available. Unfortunately, it seems like the best tasting fruit has the most susceptibility.

Thats because the public is being bambozeled into thinking that organically grown fruit is so much more healthful that the consumer winds up paying sometimes double the price for it. Most of these pesticides are burn't off by the sun. Also, anyone with brains will wash all the fruit they grow or buy, even if it claims to be organically grown. I find the organically grown fruits and vegetables in my stores is not worth the premium prices asked. I just do a good job of washing it. The fruit I grow is controlled so that I don't

spray trees that are due for picking in the next few weeks.

If you think that nature will take care of things for us, just go into a wooded area where you will find wild fruit trees, or those from a deserted orchard, and look at the fruit condition. It is usually attacked like crazy.

Not in my neighborhood.

It's not just the wasps that are the problem. In fact they are usually one of the lesser pests. You will be happy to know I use 'organic' traps to catch them with apple juice as a lure. See, I am not close minded about organics, but I think they can only solve part of the problem.

The bees are most susceptible to harm when they are feeding on the pollen from fruit blossoms. I have never found any dead bees around my trees.

Possibly because there are big bucks now in selling overpriced organic products.

I will match my home orchard any day to yours, because there are other ways to contaminate the area, like not keeping it clean.

Reply to
sherwindu

I do believe that things are different in different parts of the country. On the west coast, I have seen unsprayed plum and apple trees from Seattle to the Bay Area (including Portland and Eugene) producing prolifically. In the Bay Area itself, I have seen countless citrus, also unsprayed. Evidently the climate does some things to a variety of pests, or simply the apple trees in those urban areas are too few and far between for apple maggots to prosper. I do have maggots in my two apple trees in SE MI, and I just ignore the trees because anyway there are numerous apple trees about 300 yards away (well within range).

For many diseases, it is clear that a fat layer of wood chips, plus some manure every now and again, rock dust and wood ash occasionally, vastly improves the tree resistance. I just met a guy who gardens in Hawaii, which is disease hell. he has a backyard orchard with over 30 fruit trees/shrubs, and he does nothing to any of them except feed the soil (well, prune too). I have myself several pear trees, also unsprayed, which produce 50% clean fruit - good enough for me. But the Midwest seems to be worse than the West Coast as far as fruit pests.

Reply to
simy1

Many years ago, I moved from Louisville KY to Los Angeles. The "natives" would ask me what was the biggest change, expecting me to rave about the climate, the cultural stuff, etc.. My answer was always the same "You don't have any bugs!".

So yes, things do vary from one part of the country to another.

So does the variety of yellow jackets and their agressiveness :-).

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

i, too, have a fatal allergy to yellowjackets and hornets; but i also know if you spray for them, you are also taking the terrible chance at killing the bumblebees, the honeybees, and other beneficials. what "I" do is to carry my epipen EVERY WHERE i go AND i also underwent the 5-year venom programme at my local hospital, which means...i still have to go to a hospital after i've been stung, but only to get a heavy duty inhale of oxygen and a 2 hour look-see to make sure my throat doesn't clog up.

all in all, it was worth spending 2 hour segments of my time for 5 years rather than spraying for a bugger who's been on earth way longer than human beans.

p.s. you are wasting your money by hiring orkin or any similar killer company because 1) yellowjackets usually overtake an older existing mole or vole home and therefore it is quite maze-like; and 2) the yellowjackets will just move their queen to another hole and make that their home. how many holes can you hire someone to spray...and kill???

Reply to
<bluesalyxx

WAIT!!!! here's yet another anti-pesticide fantatic!!! (although, personally, i'd rather be called totally organic and natural, thank you veddy much.

against the advice of all my horticulture (NO!! that does NOT mean the raising of hortas) teachers, i ran a terrific herbal and tropical fruit greenhouse in oregon for almost 6 years. i used the yellow stickies, ladybeetles, preying manti, and i even brought in newts to eat "bad" buggies. i never ever once used any chemical spray, including those which are called "natural" like pyrethrin. to me, ANY substance which can kill

6-leggers, will also kill 2 and 4 leggers!!!

anti-pesticide fantatics of the garden world.....LET US JOIN TOGETHER!!! (and pace the place near madison square garden) ;o)

Reply to
<bluesalyxx

Many very odd things in what you wrote, bordering on phobic.

That you find better agricultural practices a religion indicates you are not thinking rationally to start with. Your previous admission that you spray CONSTANTLY except for that brief time when the orchard is blooming shows how extreme your case is. I wouldn't call your own behavior cultic, merely dangerouslky mnisguided.

Of course fruit falls to the ground. Unlike your orchard, most farmers do not HARVEST from the ground. You said explicitely that the wasps that attack fruits on the ground is the reason you have to poison your orchard continuously. Wasps feed & drink at the wounds of damaged fruits, yes, but worse, fruits harvested after they fall are a common source of of e-coli.

Organic principles does not mean a quick fix spray. You clearly don't know squat about the topic, & it's unfortunate for you & the helath of your family, your neighbors, your environment. Organic would define the way you mulch, the way you mow or don't mow nearby meadows, the types of predator inesects you encourage from the wild or introduce, PROPERLY TIMED bacterial sprays, much else that is the reason the organic fruit farmers have repeatedly been shown in university studies to produce fruits larger, tastier, & more numerous than chemical-reliant farmers.

By killing everything in sight & spraying continuously. Great.

You're only thinking alternatives to poisons aren't poisonous enough, because you're fabulouslky ignorant of organic methods. Otherwise you'd already know most organic fruit growers do not have apple maggot or plum curculio, the ONLY orchard problems that have no after-the-fact fix that is organic. A properly cared for fully-system organic approach does not allow for the mass-flourishing of a single species of insect in the first place.

With a healthy predator insect population & a proper clean-up problem at the end of each harvest month, your concern about there being no organic sprays for apple maggot does not even apply.

With YOUR system then perhaps it is a perpetual worry -- use of poisons breeds reliance on poisons. For these pests afflict non-organic gardeners to a much higher degree & the real threat posed to organic growers would be neighbors such as yourself whose trees have an increased likelihood of introducing diseases into a larger area.

Your taking "preventative" actions by spraying toxins continuously except for a brief time of flower wouldn't even be a chemical-sucking hilljack grower's answer to apple maggot -- not if they were in their right mind.

Apple maggots can be fully controlled by organic methods, just not by organic sprays. The method is one of the least invasive imaginable: do NOT leave unharvested fruit on the the trees through winter, & do NOT leave apples on the ground to rot & become breeding factories. Unsalable fruit should be heat-composted. Because apple maggots harbor in winter fruits & emerge in spring, that first generation will not exist in properly maintained organic orchards. And as you have admitted to harvesting even the e-coli-ridden fruits off the ground, you shouldn't have apple maggots.

They can still be worrisome because of the bad behaviors of neighboring orchards. When BAD growers introduce these diseases to finer orchards next door, the back-up organic method (sticky-traps shaped like the fuit to be protected) is not the world's best fix, it is true, & some organic growers unfortunatley prefer to not sell organic fruit that year. But a community of growers who all do it right & do not permit fallen fruit to harbor maggots through the winter won't have to make this sorry-ass decision.

Other organic controls for apple maggot includes fruit thinning, which has the added benefit of larger tastier fruits that remain, & the majority of commercial orchards do fruit thinning anyway because shitloads of inferior fruits are not marketable for anything but the low-end for juice, or hog food. Some do the thinning by hand, chemical-reliant growers have chemical methods of doing it, & the organic alternative to the chemical method is a fish oil & lime sulfur combination -- all methods of thinning increase fruit size.

But even in a worst-case scenario, the method you outlined as your method would NEVER be necessary because of two pests difficult to eradicate after bad agricultural practices have helped establish them in an orchard. A "break" from organic principles would be brief & minimimally invasive. The "low spray" technique is unfortunate but some growers use it as a fallback position, though it does harm the marketable price of the fruit thus treated in that year. Organically approved late-season sprays like Entrust do work well on apple maggots, but only when used in concert with year-end ground clean-up, & early season use of kaolin (Surround). It remains that in the majority of organic orchards, unless there's someone right next door doing it very wrong, these additional methods won't be necessary.

This certainly is not true with proper choices & proper timing, so you've just shown again you don't know what you're doing. But certainly if by "pain" you mean they only work if you're knowledgeable about organic methods, then yes, you're right.

Despite studies such as conducted at Cornell & Washington State U. that show the present state of organic orchard methods producese more fruit, tastier fruit, the preferred fruits in the marketplace, you're going to stick with methods that are known to be inferior for the quality & vallue of the harvest. You prefer inferior fruit, toxic fruit, fruit that far fewer people would want to purchase or eat if they knew what you were up to. And you'd rather hitch your waggon to a dwindling & failing argricultural system & avoid the fastest growing & most successful segment of agriculture today.

Some farmers growing annual vegetable crops have to make concessions in order cash in on the growing organics market, but orchard fruit growers gain on every level, because each year organic methods are followed, the orchard becomes healthier & produces better.

Back yard amateurs are the worst enemies of professional, qualified, knowledgeable organic growers. Your toxins spread into finer orchards; you are more apt to spread diseases; you are responsible for the implosion of pollinator & predator insect populations. You also risk the health & lives of everyone who eats fruits that developed in what you admitted was continuous chemical spraying except during the brief time of flowering.

If the science didn't support these statements then your likening organic gardening to a church with an alter for sacrifices would apply. But these are not things that need be taken on faith. Whereas your belief system is not supported by the faith, does require faith in lieu of reason, & does cause human sacrifice. So if being religioius is as big an insult as you would have it, you have just insulted ourself by projecting.

If you love gardening, if you love your orchard, at least LEARN what the organic methods really are before passing judgement on things you have rejected out of hand without a lick of knowledge.

-paghat the ratgirl

Reply to
paghat

Oh god I'd love to have a greenhouse with a population of newts wandering about in it! Were they Oregon roughskinned newts? I've kept a few in vivariums, they get really tame.

-paghat the ratgirl

Reply to
paghat

Cretin.

Reply to
Eurocat

:) i never ever once used any chemical spray, including those which :) are called "natural" like pyrethrin. to me, ANY substance which can kill :) 6-leggers, will also kill 2 and 4 leggers!!! Yet 16 years in the field and have never seen the case :/

:) anti-pesticide fantatics of the garden world.....LET US JOIN TOGETHER!!! only if it is a news group with "organic" in the title :) J/K we likes the diversity....Can't we all just plant along!!!

Lar. (to e-mail, get rid of the BUGS!!

It is said that the early bird gets the worm, but it is the second mouse that gets the cheese.

Reply to
Lar

No, no! You obviously missed the irony of my statement. What I meant was you pursue this organic kick like a religion.

First of all, I spray in about 3 week intervals, during the fruiting season, aside from dormant oil in early spring. I think you have your own flavor of extremism bordering on your cult of eco-purity.

I do not harvest from the ground. I will occasionally pick up a fruit which has fallen which does not look attacked by either insects or critters.

I don't know about your orchard, but I do a daily patrol and clean up any fruit on the ground. Most of it goes on the compost pile, or the garbage if it looks like it has some kind of infection.

Why don't you climb off your soapbox.

I don't know about the chemical-reliant farmers, but I will match up my fruit against any organic gardener for taste, size, etc. Most organic gardeners won't

grow the heritage type fruits I grow, because they are so susceptible to attack.

Yes, when I put in many hours of taking care of these trees, I don't want to see the results go to pot.

Are you making this up?????

And you call me phobic?

Baloney!

As previously mentioned, my orchard is inspected daily and no fruit is left on the ground, and still these pests come. My mulch pile heats up nicely, so I don't think they propagate there. I never admitted to harvesting e-coli-ridden fruits off the ground.

Keeping a clean orchard doesn't work for me. I'm not one of those BAD BAD growers.

I do extensive thinning, as well.

Have you ever had to clean up the Surround junk off your fruit?

Can you supply specific document sources, or else I'm going to think that you are making this all up?

I'll match my fruit any day against an organic gardener.

I may be a backyard grower, but I'm not an amateur. I'll match my knowledge of fruit growing against yours any day. You sound like an elitist snob, certainly someone who thinks they know it all. I don't distribute contaminated fruit. I allow the chemicals to subside naturally in the sun before harvesting, and I carefully wash any fruit I give away, or tell people to do so. The washing is just an added precaution, since most of the chemicals have dissipated by the time I pick the fruit.

It's not the science I'm against, but your trying to cram this stuff down our throats, like it's the gospel.

the West Nile bearing mosquitos in my area, or the Asian Longhorn Beetles. I'm sure the municipalities here would like to know about them.

Sherwin Dubren

Reply to
sherwindu

harvesting, and I

You've been unable to credibly or knowledgeably contradict anything I've posted so I won't go over it again, except to reiterate that YOUR continuing notion that organic gardening is merely a cult makes you something of an idiot savant, without the savant.

-paghat the ratgirl

Reply to
paghat

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