{"id":2065,"date":"2010-04-18T04:57:46","date_gmt":"2010-04-18T11:57:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bhagwad.com\/blog\/?p=2065"},"modified":"2010-04-18T04:57:46","modified_gmt":"2010-04-18T11:57:46","slug":"tomatoes-fighting-off-insects-in-a-chennai-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bhagwad.com\/blog\/2010\/personal\/tomatoes-fighting-off-insects-in-a-chennai-garden.html\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 34: Tomatoes – Fighting off insects in a Chennai garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

I never thought insect attacks would happen to me. I mean sure, I knew it intellectually, but somehow I thought there just weren’t insects in my garden! Turns out I was badly mistaken. My garden is alive after all.<\/p>\n

Leaf miners<\/h3>\n

After noticing some squiggly white lines on Virender and Noah, I thought there may be some pests around and sure enough, with the Internet it wasn’t difficult to find out. Here’s what I saw:<\/p>\n

\"Leaf<\/a>
Leaf miners on my tomato leaves :( - Wikipedia picture<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It turns out that the larvae of these insects burrow inside<\/em> the leaf and eat it up. This makes them immune from most sprays since they can’t be touched. So I did the only thing I could. I found the end of the white lines where I could see the yellowish larvae and pinched them through, hopefully killing it. And indeed, I never saw a line progress after a pinch.<\/p>\n

But many of my leaves are attacked like this, and soon even Fathima and Chun li had them :( . Today I saw full grown leaf miner (a tiny yellow and black fly) sitting on a leaf. Squished it of course, but I don’t know how many there are…<\/p>\n

Stalk insects<\/h3>\n

The stalks of all four are covered with little brown insects. I don’t know if they damage the plants, but they may retard their grown. Scraping them off is no help as they just come back.<\/p>\n

Compost tea<\/h3>\n

Following some advice on the net, I brewed some compost tea by soaking compost in water for 3 days and then spraying it on the plants. But I didn’t notice any cessation of leaf miner or stalk insect activity.<\/p>\n

Neem leaf extract<\/h3>\n

This seems to be working. The maid soaked and boiled some neem leaves. I sprayed the extract onto the young saplings. That was yesterday, and I’m not sure if it’s worked or not but it seems to have helped. Neem seed oil is supposed to be better, but I don’t know how to extract the oil from the seeds.<\/p>\n

Apparently neem doesn’t kill the insects outright. When they ingest it, they “forget” to eat, mate and even fly! This of course, breaks their life cycle and kills them off. It also doesn’t harm beneficial insects like spiders which don’t actually feed off the plant.<\/p>\n

I could go to the horticultural society and buy some insecticide, but my purpose in growing vegetables is to become self sufficient, and if I can’t make the insecticide myself, I would rather not use it. Let’s see though. If the situation becomes too bad I may not have a choice.<\/p>\n

Only a few days more and I’m going to transplant the four once more into their final gamlas! I’ll try and post some pics, but since I’ll have to take them with the phone camera, they might not be that grand…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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