Gardening and Greenhouse

Green Thumb answers:

Sometimes a simple solution of a spray mixture of liquid soap and water will work effectively. It disaggrees with the insects digestive tracks and they soon stop eating. Just remember to wash them well before you eat them and to reapply after rains. Hope this helps .

Green Thumb answers:

There are lots of pest-solution that don’t involve pesticides, but they differ depending on your pests!

First option is just to pick the bugs off and squish them. This involves checking your crops every day (every night for slugs and snails) and not being too squeamish.

Sometimes you can plant certain plants together to deter pests. They say if you grow your carrots amongst lots of onions, carrot-fly won’t be able to smell your carrots and will leave them alone. Coriander among lettuces keeps aphids away. Growing petunias under your asparagus keeps asparagus beetles away (this works like magic!). Lots of sage among your cabbages and cauliflowers is supposed to deter cabbage-white butterflies (who lay lots of caterpillars!). Look up ‘companion planting’ for more examples.

You can cover crops with a fine insect-proof mesh to keep bugs off. It can be expensive and it can be fiddly, but it works.

Household soap dissolved in water and sprayed onto blackfly, whitefly, greenfly etc. Kills them.

You can combat caterpillars on your crops by sprinkling them with flour and then water – they get all gunked up and fall off the plants.

Use beer traps for slugs and snails, scatter eggshells round your plants, or use copper collars. You can also buy organic slug pellets which are supposed to be harmless.

Overall, the best defence for your plants is a lot of regular care and attention. The stronger and healthier and moe nourished they are, the more resistant to attack they will be, and the more frequently you check your plants, the quicker you can intervene when something starts to go wrong.
You can buy seaweed extract formula which is supposed to be wonderful for boosting the general health of your plants, making them more pest- and disease-resistant, but even this is not a substitute for plenty of careful attention.

Green Thumb answers:

I was looking into “organic” mosquito repellent and found that the one with cernanthumums (bad spelling) in it is effective. I don’t know what it is called though.

Sorry.

Green Thumb answers:

Soak some tobacco in boiling water for an hour or so. Nicotine is a very strong insecticide.Spray a dilute solution on your plants. Do not use on tomatoes or potatoes to prevent the spread of mosaic virus.
What I find incredible is that some people actually like inhaling this insecticide as a smoke!

Green Thumb answers:

If you read the actual bills you will find these are bills to enforce regulations upon large farms and processing plants and will not hinder back yard gardening nor small farmers selling unprocessed foods direct to their customers. It has nothing to do with abolishing the USDA organic program nor fining housewives for not using approved foods nor forcing America’s farmers to use GMO’s (the conventional guys are pretty close to 100% using these already so stay away from corn soy, canola, rice, beet sugar, papayas and cottonseed. There are no other GMO foods in commercial production…yet)

This has nothing to do with the Obama Administration and everything to do with the congress-i.e. The executive branch did not write this bill though Obama may sign the bill into law if it passes through the house and the Senate