Simple Green Pest and Disease Control by Bob Flowerdew

Author:Bob Flowerdew
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620872871
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2012-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

There are also other repellents; all sorts of noxious smelling things may deter various creatures, big and small, at least temporarily, such as soap (use soap flakes or shaving soap, not dishwashing detergent), aftershave, cheap perfume, garlic, chilli, sour milk, urine, and so forth. Incidentally, moles ignore almost anything smelly, so don’t even bother.

Fifth line of defense: Hide and seek

To find their food, most pests use smell. First this is because, apparently, most insect eyes work better close up, and second because smells travel further. It is said that carrot root flies can smell you touching the foliage from seven miles, though whether they could fly upwind that far, I doubt. Still, the point is that most smell from a distance, use their sight to zero in then check with smell come taste. So one solution is to camouflage our plants visually and, even more effectively, by smell.

It is well noted that unusual variations of common pest-prone plants do not always suffer to the same degree—sometimes more, sometimes less. So red- or rather purple-colored brassicas may escape as much damage as the usual green forms and birds are often fooled into leaving yellow ripening berries, which they “expect” to ripen red. Perhaps an edible dye might one day make certain crops “invisible.”

Intercropping, mixing plants, to hide shape and smell does work, simply by making each harder to spot than when grown in a monoculture. (And it is also harder for an infestation or infection to spread.) It has long been common to grow onions and carrots together, as each masks the other’s smell from their respective flies. Likewise, when brassicas are grown with French beans, both suffer fewer attacks from several assorted pests, and lavender under roses is believed to dissuade aphids. Though we are verging on companion planting here, there is a subtle distinction, and we need to be careful; sometimes a negative companion effect, or just plain competition, can outweigh an intercropping advantage. When investigating the theory that wormwood (artemisia) exuded such a strong smell that it deterred butterflies from laying on brassicas, they discovered this to be true; but the cabbages liked the wormwood’s exudations even less and their yield dropped unacceptably. So, perhaps the best policy is to have confusing smells produced around but not among the protected crop.

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