Specific Pest Treatments
Okay, before you deploy, please remember:
1. Identify –You must determine what pest you have so you don’t treat the wrong thing. Monitor and identify with a hand magnifier and an identification book.
2. Timing is crucial for planting, monitoring, and treating, especially if you are releasing beneficial predators.
3. Beneficial predators are practical in greenhouses; they fly away in outdoor settings.
4. Inter-plant by mixing flowers, herbs, & vegetable varieties together. This helps to hide your desired crops, confuse & distract pests from them, and disrupt insect pest mating cycles.
5. For sucking insects. Choose treatments that plug insects’ breathing pores (such as soaps and oil sprays).
6. For chewing insects. Choose treatments that are distasteful.
Aphids: Some sources recommend regularly blasting the infected plants with high-powered water. This sometimes helps, but is very harsh on the plants. Instead, make sure plants have plenty of space between them. Long-range, reduce the nitrogen proportion in your soil, as excess nitrate attracts aphids. Remedy any closed, damp environments with better air circulation. Attract beneficial insect predators with alyssum & other non-patented, open pollinated flowers. Monitor and trap with sticky traps, both blue and yellow. Spray with fish oil solution, or insecticidal soap. Use home-made or commercial ones like Safer or Concern products. See recipes for home-made soap sprays in next section. Introduce beneficials like syrphid fly larva, green lacewings, and ladybugs as predators in greenhouse situations.
Cabbage or turnip root maggot: Always rotate cole crops each year. Delay sowing brassicas after peak egg-laying dates, e.g. planting turnips in late July. Destroy newly laid eggs on stems. Sprinkle Diatomaceous Earth at base of plants when eggs are found. Cover beds with insect barriers such as floating row covers. Sow trap crops around your crop, such as a ring of radishes. Add parasitic nematodes. Install a flat collar of tar paper or cardboard at plant bases. Hill up the plant stems with 1½” thick layer of soil or sawdust, 6-8" in diameter and maintain. Harvest root crops in early maturity.
Caterpillars in berry bushes: In currants, they are Sawfly larvae, & won’t respond to Bt. Hand-pick. Apply Neem oil. Try Spinosad product. Research some more.
Cutworm: Hunt, swish, squish. Place collars, nails or matchsticks around stems, row covers. Apply Bt (Bacillus thuringiensus), commercially sold as Dipel, or apply Spinosad. Apply Diatomaceous Earth (DE) around base of each plant. Introduce beneficial nematodes.
Flea Beetles: Hill up plants to encourage more root growth. Side-dress plants with blood or soy meal. Cover the crop with floating row covers. Rotate crops. Spray with organic insecticide.
Moose: Build a high fence. Electrify fence. Tie a cord around garden borders that is moose-eye high. Plant extras of crops. Plant willows outside of garden. Apply Plantskydd or rhubarb juice on non-food plants. Cover your crops with floating row covers so moose can’t see the crops.
Onion root maggot: Destroy new eggs on stems. Spread Diatomaceous Earth when eggs are discovered. Interplant all over the garden or use floating row covers. Rotate crops.
Slugs: Please see separate list just on slug management.
Spider Mites: Research and purchase predator mites. Apply Aza-Max.
Wireworm: Pick and kill as you see them in soil, or as adult form. Plant extra crops & flowers.
Whiteflies: Provide your plants ample water; drought attracts whiteflies. Monitor with yellow sticky traps. Spray with fish oil or insect soap. In greenhouses, follow with whitefly parasite (Encarsia formosa).