Re:The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
by type_enthusiast on Friday March 12, 2021 @09:34PM
(#26443378)
To contrast leaf-miners with other agricultural pests – before the leaf-miners came to town, we also had a bunch of Giant Swallowtail Butterflies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papilio_cresphontes) that made their homes in our citrus trees. Their caterpillars never did too much damage, and the annual presence of huge, striking butterflies was pretty enjoyable.
Sadly, I think our (organic) efforts to get rid of the leaf-miners also killed off the butterflies.
Re:The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
by bekindandopen on Friday March 12, 2021 @09:52PM
(#26443466)
I once had the opportunity to talk with some apple growers in Washington (state).
They said that they regularly sprayed their trees with a mix of water and soft detergent early in the season, to prevent parasites and larvae from taking hold. As I understood it, they viewed soap as a simple solution. It was not completely organic and natural, but it helped to keep pests away and it did not seem to cause undue harm to the orchards or the apples.
Re:The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
by type_enthusiast on Friday March 12, 2021 @11:03PM
(#26443847)
Interesting, I'll give that a try this Spring! Thanks for the tip. Soapy water in general doesn't seem like something that's problematic as far as eating the oranges later... whether it's technically "organic" or not is secondary for me. I guess that maybe raises an eyebrow about what "organic" means, if soapy water isn't acceptable.
The second year of the leaf-miners, I would go out there every morning and look for affected leaves, just so I could squish the little bugger inside the leaf before it could become an adult moth. It was satisfying, but never really helped.
Re:The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
by space_fountain on Friday March 12, 2021 @07:44PM
(#26442782)
A note. Typically non organic pesticides are less broad spectrum poisons but applied in higher concentrations since they "can't" hurt humans
But, they seem to be really hard to combat. Efforts to do so (without blanket use of synthetic pesticides) are few, for whatever reason, and anecdotally of questionable efficacy (I managed to track down some pheremone-driven leaf-miner moth traps, which caught a lot of the buggers but didn't really solve anything).
Eventually I figured out that a combination of neem oil and spinosad (Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew) would kill the larval ones, but it didn't kill the eggs and so it would have to be applied every 4 days or so in order to make any progress. I. guess things like that are one of the reasons organic produce is more expensive – some of these things that nature throws at you are hard to combat without using broad-spectrum poison.