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Hi, I am Dave Epstein, welcome to Growing Wisdom. And we are with Tony Antonucci, our Senior Holticulturist here at the Wellesley’s GreenHouses.
And today Tony is going to talk with us a little bit about controlling some of the bad bugs you get on plants with good bugs.
Dave: It is incredible that you are controlling almost every single plant in here without using pesticides.
Tony: We have been very fortunate and we really have to go through here on a daily basis. Checking our plants and planning sort of this, if something starts, we want to get it at that stage.
Dave: So tell me some of the things that you release that are good and what are they controlling that is bad?
Tony: This stuff on the list right now is called the cucumeris and it is going after thrips and thrips are small, piercing sucking insects that feed on the undersides of leaves. And by releasing these beneficial bugs, they are going after the thrips.
And the other part of that is something called Hypoaspis Miles and that is something that we release on the soil and that goes of to thrips and it also goes after fungus gnats and both of those, if they feed on the plant too much can sort to spread viruses.
Dave: So these are actual good bugs that are eating, that they eat the thrips?
Tony: yes they do.
Dave: Now what else you are doing in the greenhouse to control the fact because once you get bugs in here, I would imagine it can really explode.
Tony: Yeah, for ever coming through after this leaves on the bench we are picking those up. Those leaves are where the insects will harbor and continue to fest off.
The other thing that we are trying to do also is to grow these plants as healthy as we possibly can and that is not putting the plants under too much stress. So, coming through here and watering on a regular basis, venting and keeping the place is the environment is good as we possibly can.
The plants are under stressed and the insects are less up to increase in greater numbers at that point.
Dave: What about with the soil, is there anything special you do with the soil?
Tony: Yes, we started a few years ago by using a very bricked good compost that is full of a lot of beneficial organisms and with that, we are not using chemical fertilizers and we are using more natural organic type fertilizers.
One of the things that we do here also is we spray just a slight murky solution of just hand soap and we also used canola oil.
When you do spray, you want to spray the undersides of the leaves just not the tops.
Dave: Well Tony, thank you very much. Thanks for your time.
Hope you enjoy this edition of Growing Wisdom. Hope it can be a little more green around the house.
Come back every week for all of our tips, hints and helps here in GrowingWisdom.com
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