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...