More Biological Control - Thrip Predators! (Amblyseius cucumeris) On Chilli Plants

Since the thrips are back, and the "thripinator" apparently doesn't work on them at all, I am bored of their damage to plants, and I'm bored of seeing them on my fruits - albeit they havent actually damaged any fruits yet.

Say Hi to Steve. Yes, I named him before squashing him.

Apparently - thrip levels have to get above "40 per plant" to be seriously destructive, below that they're just annoying. 

So, other than the aluminium mulch, and picking them off by hand (sellotape works REALLY well by the way!), I thought I'd try something different. Meet the mites!

These are predatory mites Amblyseius cucumeris. I first encountered these with broad mites, though I didnt use them in the end.

The sachets, acquired from Just Green in the UK, contain a feed and eggs, so the mites hatch at a fairly regulated level, apparently around 400 per week, for 6 weeks. They recommend one sachet per plant, though the manufacturer implies a level of one per 3 plants should be enough.

I have to say, this all looks very promising - but we'll see!

Biological pest control can be fun and cheap - fungus gnats controlled with carnivorous plants!

People seem to really hate fungus gnats - those little flies that hang around the soil on your plants and fly up when you water or touch the pots. They are an annoyance and they do apparently eat the roots of plants, but I've never had much of a problem with them. Because for me, they're FOOD.

No, no, I don't eat them. Probably taste like wafer though, most small flies do. Don't ask me how I know this. Back to the point - carnivorous plants..

For Fungus Gnats

Best things at eating these critters is butterwort (pinguicula) or sundew (drosera). The easiest ones to not kill are mexican butterwort and cape sundew. They need a lot of light and heat - what a coincidence - so do chillies.

Cape Sundew - waiting for flies! 

The great advantage with these plants is they are literally nature's fly-paper. They also digest the flies so you don't have to do much maintenance. They grow new leaves so you dont have to buy more, and they are very low maintenance. All they need is the soil to be kept damp (yes very damp, way damper than chillies, they're a bog plant!) and sun - lots of sun.

Cape Sundew (or at least I think it is..!)

The pinguicula is even better - it's a total gnat magnet, and it divides and conquers!

I divided my pinguicula up - I bought it a year ago for £3ish, largely ignored it, then yesterday noticed there were MANY rosettes - you can split them out. I ended up with no less than TWELVE individual potted plants. That's a lot. From one plant.

12 Pinguiculas!

How quickly do they catch flies? Well, after division, I hosed the plants down so all the flies came off. Next day I put one of the new plants into the greenhouse and within just one minute...

OM NOM NOM...!

Soil requirements - this is important - ALL carnivorous plants (to my knowledge) are used to having poor soil, when I say poor I mean it's specifically bad. I buy carnivorous plant soil so I dont have to worry about mixing it. Seriously - if you get even SOME fertiliser in the mix, the plants rot away. Apparently. 

So instead of using various chemicals to solve your fungus gnat problem - give nature a go. You may be very surprised to see how effective it is. 

For houseflies, wasps, etc...

These are bigger insects and need bigger traps - you probably know about the venus fly trap, well it will work here but they are a pain to keep and notoriously die within a year. Easier to keep are plants like the pitcher plant or sarracenia.

The flies slip in and can't climb out - it's that simple!

May Update - First Chilli Eaten!

Been very busy with chilli plants, repotting like mad. With the warmer weather of end April / Beginning May, the plants really took off, especially those with the prime real estate in the south facing bay window.

I'm repotting into "final" pots, 15cm (6 inch). I think for some plants this won't be final, but for a lot of them, example super chilli, apache, this will be the final pots. We'll see. Certainly final for now.

First Chilli

So, I thought super chilli or last year's scotch bonnet might be the first chilli that I ate, but no. An apache plant grown from seed on the 15th December took the honours. Unfortunately I wasn't smart enough to take a photo of it, but here's it chopped up ready to eat.

Hot? You bet.

More chillies are on their way from Super Chilli, and Apache plants. And the overwintered scotch bonnet finally got round to the idea of not throwing away its flowers and actually has some fruits coming!

Plenty of tiny scotch bonnets coming along there! I've had a lot of trouble coaxing this plant into action. The soil is constantly wet and I can't get the transpiration rates up, I've even tried replacing the compost. That's why the leaves look a bit yellowy, it's not enjoying the damp. I've put a fan on it the last few days in the hopes it might help, it gets full sun so I'm not really sure I understand what's going on, but, I guess sometimes you get that kind of thing.

The rest

Apache doing well - this one gave the first fruit

Super chilli "F2"

Bhut Jolokia doing well!

Rather a lot of foliage on this windowsill now!

Keeping the balance - AKA an ode to avoiding pesticides when growing vegetables

It's no secret that I lurk on various forums reading up on how to grow chillies, pests, disease and so on.

Something that's been "bugging" (pun intended) me for a while now, is what in my opinion is the hobbyists over-reliance on broad spectrum chemical insecticides, and for that matter, organicides.

Let me go into some more detail here.

I see this scenario play out over and over again:

1) A forum member spots a handful of bugs chewing their plant(s). Posts photos online to ask for ID and prognosis, treatment, etc.

2) "Experienced" forum members all climb over themselves to help. This is good btw, I like how helpful forum members can be in chilli forums!

3) Advice ranges from "I use AVID" to "peroxide" to "SMOKE BOMB" to "pyrethrin every week for a month" to worse suggestions involving chemicals I wouldn't put on my own vegetables. And so on.

4) Forum member who asks has no way to balance these opinions so often will take the nastiest looking chemical or worse, multiple chemical solutions, and goes at all their plants.

5) Forum member reports "success". Mutual back patting ensues.

6) Forum member then posts another major outbreak of either a secondary pest or a larger outbreak of the same pest. This time, it's much worse.


Now, why does this happen? Well. The universe is in a fine balance, and that does extend as far as your garden too. When you went at it with what they call "broad spectrum insecticides", you killed "most" of the pests. You also killed "most" of the other organisms hanging round the plant and if you watered it into the soil, there too.

Now this does apply more to gardens than indoor plants, but both to an extent. If you disturb the balance with a "KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!" mentality, then did you really expect your post-apocalyptic scenario to pan out well? Guess who will come back first, the beneficial insects that eat the pests, or the pests themselves? :)

So - I suppose you want me to give you an alternative? Well, OK. Try using pesticides as a LAST resort, and using them much more strategically. Try thinking through a progressive strategy starting with a fairly passive response if you haven't got a major infestation.

And more importantly - a change of mindset is necessary. You should never expect to keep a pest free crop. It's a fool's errand. Think of it more as pest control than pest eradication.

This doesn't apply to all pests, for example aphids are a pain, whereas a handful of broad mites can and will destroy your entire crop overnight. So, with some pests, you can't mess around and you have to take the big guns out. But the majority of pests just don't need this scale of action. You can live with them. You can buy predators, you can attract predators, you can make the conditions unfavourable. You can keep the balance.

Just think about it, before drenching in spinosad or neem.

What do ladybirds eat?

Well - Cheerios. Obviously!

  

I'm trying to encourage them to stick around, and giving them cheerios might just work!

New insects! [Booklice]

Found this under a plant pot, no idea what it is..beneficial or nasty? 

 

Edit: found out they are "booklice" or related, harmless insects that normally eat bark or similar. Nice to have found an insect that won't eat my chillies, for a change!

The Thrip-inator (or, how to adapt a vacuum cleaner hose to pick up bugs on chilli peppers)

Thrips are fast! I've been picking them off by hand for the last 3 days or so. So, I thought, well, you tap the leaves, they fall off, so they're not clinging on that well - right??

Enter the THRIPINATOR.

Basic idea

Adapt a vacuum cleaner to be able to suck thrips off a leaf with a reasonable efficacy and without [significant] damage to the plants and/or buds and/or flowers.

Development

Important features are:
Lower suction - we want to remove the bugs, not the leaves or the soil!
Catch the bugs - A nice way to see what we've caught afterwards

 An initial diagram evolved to cover those two bases.

Initial Tests

First, I need to see how much suction is too much suction.
My vacuum cleaner is awesome. It has a dial that you can use to reduce the speed of the motor and hence the suction power, this is intended for curtains more than thrips, but, we make do...
Fashioning a head seemed easier with a soap bottle than with a coke bottle, with the added bonus that during tests, some soap might get onto the plants and kill a thrip or two - you can hope!

Here it is - the thrip-inator v0.1

And here's a vid of it in action:

Will it work? Not sure. I couldn't find a single thrip during this morning's rounds...

Thrips - Aluminium (Aluminum) foil mulch time

Ah, yes. The joy of thrips.

I found a handful of these on my chillies so far.

Thrips are tiny insects that you probably already know about, but you don't know that they're destructive to your chillies. Ever had one of those little wormy flies land on your arm while out in the heat of summer? Those are thrips.

Unfortunately they often come with the soil, as seems to have happened to me, so there's really not a lot you can do to prevent them. The best advice is to be vigilant, and stop a sporadic thrip becoming an outbreak. Thrip watch!

Always check under leaves with a loupe / magnifying glass - that's where most bugs hide, thrips, broad mites, aphids, and so on, and so on. Daily spot checks of leaf undersides is a must, even if you think you are bug free!

Aluminium Mulch

This simply means putting a collar of aluminium over the plant's stem base from the stem right to the edge of the pot. Don't worry, it's not for the oven, it's simply a potential thrip disruption tactic.
This is how it's SUPPOSED to work: Thrips go into the soil to lay eggs. They know where the soil is because it's dark and soily. By putting aluminium there, it makes the soil look a lot more like the sky, and the thrips have no idea where the soil is. Kind of like a hall of mirrors for a thrip.

Other Measures

Like most pest control methods, I imagine it won't work alone - which is where other measures come in. Namely

1) I have a couple of willing volunteers. I have no idea where they came from, but they're VERY welcome

2) Quarantine of known infested plants and daily inspections/squishing - thankfully thrips on plants are big enough to see and also just about big enough to squish.

 Currently only one plant has a confirmed thrip problem and I'm picking off around two daily at this time. So, it's not panic stations yet. Let's hope we can keep it that way!

Massive update, greenhouses and propagators, seeds and flowers!

I've been very busy lately, with repotting, planting, transplanting, building a greenhouse, and so on.

Greenhouse

First things first, the Greenhouse was finished a while ago,

 

Although I haven't been able to use it yet as I've been recording temperatures as low as minus 1 celsius. Which...well....is too cold by a fair way. 

Good weather is forecast though! Happy times! 

Growing Update 

Seedlings have become young plants already:

Well ahead of normal growing, the bigger plants are mainly Super Chilli with some Apache and Cherry bomb mixed in, and they were sown in mid December so I'm happy about that.

As in my other post, the overwintered and totally lopped scotch bonnet is also doing well, flowers by the tonne already.

More Seeds!

So - well, given that I blew all my seeds in Dec/Jan really and now have none left to sow in March when you're actually supposed to sow them, I thought I'd get more.

We have Naga Morich

and also this awesome list of seeds:

Peter Pepper in Red Yellow and Orange (separate packets!)
Aji Lemon
Birdseye  (the Thai one)
Thai Dragon
Hot Lemon (this one is lemon flavoured!)
More Monkey Face
Fatalii yellow.

They're all already in the propagator!

More Propagators!

So, I bought another small electric propagator. Then, I went into Aldi (a German discount supermarket emporium here in the UK) and they'd reduced their electric propagators to £5, so I had to buy the remaining 2. I mean, some places charge £5 for a lid!

So my total electric propagator army is now 5 strong. Excessive? Well, maybe not, because they're all currently FULL!

Propagators at full capacity! And yes, that is a Duran Duran vinyl. So what?

Other news

I've had a lot of buds on the new plants, they're too small really to be having flowers, I think. I'm considering what to do. I've already pinched some buds off, but from what I recall of last year, the early buds do tend to grow into full chillies, so I might leave some. Still thinking about that.

I've also somehow begun growing tomatoes. Well, they're just fat round chillies with no heat aren't they? I'll try to keep this blog "tomato free" but they might creep in now and then ;o)

First flower of the year!

From the overwintered Scotch Bonnet!

Greenhouse!

Having already overflowed the bay window I grow my chillies in, I guess I should build the greenhouse I got in the January sales. It's been sat in the hall waiting for me to get round to it.

To be fair, nobody wants to start digging soil to put slabs down in the ice/snow/wind of January do they?

Here's the base. Literally just dug over the soil and flattened it, and eased the slabs into a vaguely flat pattern.

It's a tiny greenhouse really. If I'd realised how small, I might have gone for a size bigger. The main problem I will have is the roof is too low - but, I guess we'll see.

The greenhouse, for the record, was this one from homebase. It cost me £151.99. :)

I'm aware that it has bad reviews too. But, seriously, £151.99....for a greenhouse.....

Grow Update - 8 Feb 2014

I'm afraid there's not much to say, everything is growing pretty slowly at this time of year and obviously no signs of fruits or flowers, so the updates are slow too.

2nd batch of seeds are germinating nicely though:

Nice quick germination even on the bhut jolokia this time. The only one that I'm waiting for is Tabasco, which is turning out to be quite a stubborn one! Perhaps a dodgy batch of seeds...

All the pre-xmas plants are nice and green which is a relief. Today's quite sunny too, so I'm sure they're appreciating it!

As a side note, that arrangement pictured above, of 7 pots to one big pot tray, works really well!

Peter Pepper Seeds!

For those of you who haven't heard of Peter Pepper, then you need to go google it now.

It's singly the most rude plant known to mankind. I mean, seriously.

So, when I had the chance to get some seeds? Of course I did!

Good news too - they have germinated. How did I germinate them? Nothing special, just the heated propagator. Took exactly 7 days, which is surprisingly short too. Must be nice and toasty in that propagator!

Overwintering!

Due to having such issues last year with mites and yield, I wasn't actually going to overwinter any plants. In fact, I hacked them off at the stumps and threw them out.

But - I took pity on one scotch bonnet plant in the end. Its leaves weren't all mottled and sick looking like the other plants, so I kept it around.

I did however hack it right back to a stump. Literally. Look:

 The leaves you see weren't there when I hacked it. They've grown. And look, green shoots out of the main trunk!

Actually against all odds, I think we might just have a good start for this plant this year. I'm looking forward to the prospect of some good scotch bonnets!


Overwintering, apparently, isn't so hard after all.

Growing Update

Nothing spectacular to report.

Growth seems pretty slow at the moment, but I think its partially due to the small size of the plants (they have grown relative to their size immensely!) and partially how little sun they get at this time of year!

Super Chilli is doing best...

And Bhut Jolokia isn't too bad either, these always grow slower, considering these were planted around the same time in December, I don't think this is too bad a result! 

In the next few days, i.e. the beginning of February, I'm going to plant the next batch of seeds. This will be a more serious event - this is when you're supposed to plant them. I'll be doing some seeds of every type!

A New Macro Lens - And Some Minor Trouble...

I'm happy to have got hold of a 1:1 macro lens, finally. 1:1 means the image on "film" (digital in this case) is exactly the same size as in real life. That means an insect like a small spider, or a tiny leaf from a seedling, will take up the entire camera photo. That means I can now take some stunning close ups.

Although, of course it's still only capable of taking photos as well as I am :)

If you fancy macro photography, you can't beat a 1:1 macro. Most "macro" lenses aren't true 1:1 macro, the difference is, well, big.



And so on to the bad news. Well, to be quite honest it's nothing. One of the three bhut seedlings has a funny leaf curling and browning. I imagine it's probably going to recover but in all these kinds of cases I absolutely always quarantine. You just never know.

Probably just light+water burn or perhaps got a bit chilly overnight....but can't be too careful

Growing Update: All is well

Well mostly.

Last years thai super seeds are doing great!

A Mixup Of Cherry Bomb, Thai Super, Apache...

 Bhut Jolokia growing well, although I notice some of the leaves look funky - more on that later..




And finally - a side note for entertainment. Ever planted Basil? They puff up into these white jelly blobs as soon as you add water. Insane...

Transplanting to Pots

The seed trays were getting kinda busy...

So it was time to put them into pots.

  
Nothing technical - fill a pot with soil, leave about 1cm or so at the top. Poke your finger right down to the 2nd knuckle.

Separate the seedlings gently, generally I stick a finger in the soil adjacent to them and lift them out from the side, this supports the roots a bit, they don't have much root at this stage but what they do have is typically very deep, usually all the way to the bottom of the tray. This is why you need to poke a hole very deep into the plant pot!

I bury the stalks about 3/4 inch in too. Mostly for aesthetics but it might also help them grow upright better.


All done! :)

Remember to label every single pot!

Growing Update - Monkey Face and Bhut

An update since it's been a few days already!

Monkey Face chillis have all sprouted, three planted and three germinated.

The Bhut Jolokia are also doing well. However, nothing else in the "slow tray" has germinated at all.

 


The "Fast Tray" is fast becoming overcrowded, I will have to repot within a few days...