Here I was thinking that vegetable gardening is bliss. That is until the insects arrive. My beets came down with a case of leaf miner and at almost the same time that Sinfonian had leaf miner on his spinach.
I did some research on how to deal with these insects and I did not find much information that appealed to me. Most pages said to use a pesticide called sevin, I found this product and read the label, It stated something along the line of "if the person is unconscious do not induce vomiting." Needless to say I did not purchase this product. So you may say, then what are you going to do about these little buggers that are destroying your beets?I got ruthless. First I removed all the leaves except one emerging leaf per plant and disposed of the infested leaves in the garbage.
I then took a 1L spray bottle, added 2 tsp of dish soap and 2 tsp of cooking oil then filled the rest with water and lastly I mixed till it was bubbly. Once this was done I soaked the soil and plants with this mixture and then went plant by plant spray the underside of each leaf that was left. I will repeat this every 5 days and after heavy rains for a couple weeks in hope it will take care of them.
I have had good success with this insecticide with house plants so I am hoping it will work equally as well outside. If this fails I will try pyrethrin, this is made from the chrysanthemum plant. This is organic and relatively safe for humans a few days after the spraying but it is very deadly to bee's.
I hope that works for you. I'm not certain that Spinosad will work but it says is will. And since it's just liquid parasites for bugs, it is supposedly safe to harvest 24 hours after application. Of course I still wash my veggies (I did anyway to get the dirt off).
ReplyDeleteIf your even more natural method works let me know.
will do, I have used this before on aphids, spider mites and loss little fly that live in the soil of potted plants and it work for them. I'm hoping it works in this case, so far so good.
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