Transcript:
Alan: Another popular topic in June is insects. That you really want to keep an eye on. You don’t want to just ignore it and then just wake up one day and look at your garden. It’s covered in aphids or it’s covered in something.
A lot of people want to use organic insecticides and organic fungicides, and that’s great. But you have to do those as preventatives. Once you have a big problem and you have aphids covering something or you have whatever the insect might be, once you have a problem with it, organic products just don’t work as well. I mean, they will help.
But if you use those as a preventative to prevent the problem in the first place, they’re much more effective
Don’t come in with a branch, that’s with fungus all over it and say, you know, what do you have that’s organic to take care of this. Because organic fungicides are good for preventative, but they’re not really that effective for taking care of problem that you already have.
So keep in mind, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and it’s especially true with organics.
Kevin: We’ll use plants in our greenhouse and encourage customers to ask this, if they don’t know. But we use plants as scout plants. We can pick on any plants. A portalachka is going to get these aphids first. Aphids are a chewing insect, so they like the freshest softest tissue. Once that tissue hardens off, they can’t bite into it. It’s not as tasty for them.
Aphids on burning bush, the perfect scout plant. You see a little bit of curl on your burning bush leaf. It’s almost 100% going to be aphids. Aphids are hungry right now. I need to look at this plan, or this plan, because they also like aphids, so I need to get my treatment down.
Alan: That’s the same with Japanese beetles. That’s another big problem that people run into. They come in and want to buy these bags. The Japanese beetle traps. And those are great. They do catch the Japanese beetles.
But if you put those right in your garden, you’re attracting all these Japanese beetles and everyone to munch on your garden on the way to the bag. So the best thing is to buy your neighbor one. You say I got you a gift and you buy them the Japanese beetle bag, so they go to their yard to fall into the bag. Just sort of kidding.
But if you have a spot or somewhere away from your garden, that you can put the bag, that would be the best thing because you don’t want those things having lunch on the way to the bag.
Each week we're going to answer some of the more asked questions we get from our customers at Dill's Greenhouse, as well as on our Facebook page.
From plants to products. We'll be covering quite a number of gardening questions this year.
If you have a gardening question you'd like us to answer, don't hesitate to shoot us an email at info@greenhouse.net.
We may answer the question in a future Ask Dill's Greenhouse episode, or spotlight your question on our Facebook page.