Homeowner Forum / Lawn and Garden / August 2008

Try Tobacco tea.

Worked for mom for aphids.

Soak some cigarettes in water.

Too bad you can't find and dump a bunch of ladybug larvae... IME,
natural predators work better than any pesticides if  you can introduce
them in great enough numbers.

I bought lacewing eggs to control scale on my succulents.
Have not seen a scale since. :-)

While we don't usually have this happen in the gardens, I keep some
plants on my deck and they have a tendency to get whitefly when it is
especially hot and dry.  To forestall this, I spray the foliage every
day with the hose after the late-afternoon watering, paying special
attention to the undersides of the leaves.  That works about 70% of the
time for me.  When it doesn't, I use those sticky yellow traps (like
cardboard) and those catch gazillions of whiteflies and aphids.  
However, you need to situate them so that the birds cannot sit atop them
and get stuck.  I think there are pheromones for them as well.  

I can really identify with your squash problems.  Those squash vine
borers are really horrible.  I can't tell you how many times my DH has
had to do "surgery" on the vines in the past to save them.  This year,
for the first time, we put row covers over the zucchini (four different
cultivars) and they are all producing and doing well.  I go out early
every morning and hand-pollinate the female flowers with a little brush.  
This is not at all difficult with squash flowers.  We've never, ever had
summer squash this nice before.   We use the lightest weight 8 foot wide
Agribond (like cloth not plastic) over a make-do lashed wood frame.  We
started with tensile steel hoops but the plants were much to large and
vigorous for them.  Our beds are 4 feet wide and we're smack dab in the
middle of the country.  

We're going to use row covers on some fall crops as well, both to keep
out pests and extend the season.  Best thing since sliced bread.

Isabella

Yes.

Charlie

"The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was
made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun
had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their
cabbages."  ~Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, États et empires de la
lune, 1656

I found Sevin liquid concentrate 1 tablespoon per quart of water in a spray
bottle works OK.
The spray leaves a chalky residue on the leaves that dissipates in a couple
of weeks.

I'm real keen now on how to identify, locate, search and destroy crop
infesting parasites.
For instance I found a small worn camping out in a corn silk that would
eventually turn into a big ugly.

The first clue was some small tender leaves that had been chewed.

Do you have Comfidor there?  That's the chemical spray that is
recommended for whitefly here in Australia.  It is one of the sprays
with low-toxicity residues.  COMFIDOR

I wrote:

The spelling is actually CONFIDOR. It's a Bayer product.