Pests & Diseases - Grow Your Own Wants Your Advice!

[Lesley Jay]

Grow Your Own wants your advice on beating Spring and Summer pests and diseases. What are your top tips on preventing your crops being eaten and infested before you can harvest them? Just how do you beat Spring and Summer diseases on your plot or garden?

As usual the best will be published in the May issue of Grow Your Own. So come on!! It's a big plug for the Grapevine plus you might have your advice published.

[Sue]

My first year last year and was trying to be organic as possible, only gave in on the slug pellets, using the so-called organic ones where I had to.
But with slugs, remember it's a year long war, over this mild wet winter they are still out and about and I inspect everything, pick them off and either put them in my slug prison or feed them to nextdoors chickens. Look out for eggs too, like little pearls. Get rid of every single egg and slug you find!
I infused garlic bulbs in water to spray on 2 outbreaks of white fly which seemed to get rid of them.
Had a shoo-fly plant in the greenhouse to help with whitefly control, again either luck or it worked.
Grew some sacrificials such as borage and nasturtiums to attract blackfly, had one borage plant absolutely infested and only lost one broad bean plant.
Other than that I tried to make the soil as good as possible to have good healthy plants, mixed the veg up to hopefully confuse the pests and planted flowers in with the veg that attract hoverflies and ladybirds.
Make the plot hospitable to birds and frogs, anything that will eat pests.
I lost my cabbages to pidgeons and caterpillars - my fault I should have netted them, and when I did, the butterflies managed to lay eggs through the cover so you need to make sure that no cabbage leaves touch the covering.
And I now know that pigeons will eat very unripe gooseberries, not anymore though, my gooseberries will be netted very early this year.
I hope someone has some ideas on keeping mice from eating cucumbers and squash, lost a few to them.
Other than that I didn't have that many problems but I have heard that old bit of wisdom that the bugs take a year to find you so perhaps in this my second year I'll be having real problems!
Sue

Sue

[Alice]

I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing me banging on about it, but there is no BIGGER pest than roe deer . It's like having rabbits five feet high AND despite all the advice as to what you can grow that they don't eat, from experience there is nothing that they don't eat or at least bight the head off. Shooting doesn't work. That only leaves an ecological space for the next lot.
The only answer is FENCE THEM OUT. Expensive, but it works.

[GardenFan]

One of the most effective ways of cutting down flying nasties such as whitefly in the greenhouse is the yellow sticky traps (from all good garden centers) all you need to is hang a few up and just forget about them. In summer they get full quickly so do need replacing often but do a great job of keeping numbers down. To further increase your protection you can also keep a pot or two of french marigolds in the greenhouse. If you keep them near your Toms it does deter nasties from going near them. Both of these suite organic methods, I would not use traps outside as will just end up trapping friendly bugs and nasties alike.

Slugs are a pain for everyone. The organic slug pellets do cost more but are effective at keeping numbers down. I double my defense using a mound of coffee grinds around plants that run the risk of attack at the base. Rain will reduce how well each of these methods works so you should reapply your defenses after rain. Copper bands on pots are very effective but beware over hanging branches/leafs of other plants as I have known slugs/snails use these as way of getting to the pot and avoiding the band (sneaky).

[GardenFan]

Been a few points about Cats as pests on the forum and while their digging habit is annoying it can be avoided. Cats also serve as a great scarers to keep birds away so I welcome my own cat and others into my garden (keeps my peas safe )

[Mrs Dobby]

We've been saving every eggshell from every egg we've eaten for the past 6 months, in the hopes that we'll have enough crushed eggshells to use as a surrounding mulch for some of our crops to protect them from the slugs, other than that we've a reasonably sized pond with both toads and frogs in it, and a hibernating hedgehog on our plot, so the hopes are that the wildlife visitors will help us to keep the slugs under control a bit, and we will supplement them with the use of some beer traps, some sacrificial borage and a few nighttime slug raids to ensure we try our best to defeat the slimy devils! Our strawberries and raspberries have been planted through weed control fabric thats been mulched with bark chippings, in the hopes that these will deter the slugs from attacking the strawberries, as we suffered a fair bit of loss from them last year.

We are trialing 2 different ways of protecting our Carrot crops, 1 batch is being planted amongst the rows of garlic and onions, another batch will be planted under fleece / micronetting and other than that we are going to try a batch on their own, to see if we can perhaps use them as a sacrifice (to keep the carrot fly off the other more protected ones) or perhaps to give us some comparison data with the protected ones.

We will also be growing quite a few companion plants and a few flowers within both our plots, in the hopes that some will disguise the scent of the crops and others will attract the right kind of insects into our plot to deal with any of the insect problems we face.

Above those beds that could possibly be susceptible to bird attack (and including our soft fruits here) we will be using a combination of CD's and videotape suspended above the beds on string, the idea is that they move in the wind, casting reflections which scares the birds, and the tape makes a noise when it moves against itself, which should also help to scare off any birds. We will also be netting our fruits to prevent bird attack on the gooseberries, raspberries and strawbs.

We will also probably be using many of the great tips and hints that are posted by other grapes and featured in the GYO magazine aswell, anything we can do to safeguard our crops at a reasonable price has to be worth giving a go!

[nick the grief]

Grow Your Own wants your advice on beating Spring and Summer pests and diseases. What are your top tips on preventing your crops being eaten and infested before you can harvest them? Just how do you beat Spring and Summer diseases on your plot or garden?

As usual the best will be published in the May issue of Grow Your Own. So come on!! It's a big plug for the Grapevine plus you might have your advice published.

Only grow winter plants

[Lesley Jay]

Nick you missed something out. Only grow winter plants - green side up!!!!

[bramble]

Mrs D, tie some supermarket bags on canes and when the wind blows it will keep them moving and rattling and is quite good for scaring the birds and pidgeons.

[Mrs Dobby]

Thanks Bramble! Such a good idea and so simple too, why is it all the good ideas are simple ones?

[Geordie]

I posted this before, but its still my top slug tip, so.....

Ok, this I discovered quite by accident and can only assume it is not unique to my allotment.
I had a prepared raised bed that i was going to use to transplant some seedlings. I decided to use a top dressing of comfrey leaves which i knew would quickly rot down to provide nutrients at soil level. After about two days I noticed the bed had become infested by slugs. I remember it was a poor day for weather so all I had time to do was rake the comfry leaves and slugs into a pile in the middle of the bed.
A further two days went by before I returned to the allotment and I was amazed to find the pile of comfrey leaves was surrounded by a mass of slug trails. The heap itself was more congested than your supermarket two days before Christmas.
Sifting through the heap, all the slugs were removed and despatched. Over the next few days i did find more slugs appearing in the heap but numbers were diminishing. Toward the end of the second week not a slug was found anywhere. The pile of comfrey leaves were removed to the compost bin, the bed was planted with the seedlings and fresh comfrey leaves were laid around the border of the bed acting as a moat.
Over the course of the summer i continued to find slugs (only a few) in the comfry border but the crop was virtually untouched.
I dont know why this worked, slugs never seem to bother with comfry as it is growing as a plant, all i know is it did.
This was last year and i intend to do another trial this year, except this time I will use two piles on two beds...one at each end of the allotment.

[Two_Sheds]

Top Tip: grow enough for you AND the slugs/pigeons/deer/wabbits

[Protea]

In an effort to control pests on my plot i have a strip of wild flowers accross the middle which encourage natural predators (hoverflies, ladybirds and lacewings in particular). My late summer brassica's (and sprouts) got decimated by caterpillars last year and i wasn't around enough to pick them off by hand! this year i'm planning to keep them covered in netting to prevent some damage, it should also keep the mealy aphid numbers down which overwintered in great colonies on my brussels! I will use sprays when absolutely necessary, but last year i didn't spray (the plot) at all! however, i work for a company that sells 'natural' commercial pest and disease control products so i know whats in them and how/when to use them, most people don't have this option. I also introduced lacewing larvae to my chilli and tomato plants in the greenhouse to clear up my aphid infestation.

To prevent diseases, i try to avoid watering in the middle of the day and direct the water at the soil, rather than the foliage (keeping the foliage as dry as possible to to prevent spreading water-borne diseases like downy mildew/potato blight). I am not averse to using some 'natural' style sprays like citrus oil, garlic extracts, seaweed, and other things to control outbreaks and perk the plants up a bit, particularly if powdery mildew is rife, but i try not to use too many 'chemical' formulations.

To prevent soil borne diseases i grow Caliente mustard as a green manure and incorporate it into the soil as a 'bio-fumigant' which suppresses levels of a number of diseases (including verticillium wilt) and encourages the 'good guys' in the soil to out-compete the remaining levels of disease. (the leaves produce a natural gas when the plant cells are broken) I've concentrated my Mustard incorporation in sections of my plot where i am growing potatoes and onions this year, as these seem to suffer the most. Thankfully i don't have club root on my plot!