Hi! I am Tim MacWelch of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival and Ancient Skills near Fredericksburg, Virginia. This is our video series on Organic Gardening. In this clip, we're are going to talk about organic pest control. Yes, you can use organic safe methods to kill dangerous or annoying or vegetable eating bugs. So I want to show you a couple of different ways to manage your pests.
One of them is pretty old school and pretty obvious, find them and squeeze them. You can flick them off of the plants, and step on them, if you don't want to crush them with your bare hands, but if you watch them eat your vegetables, even your favorite, favorite crops, year after year after year, you may get a little vindictive, you may want to go up there and squeeze them, and that's perfectly safe, natural, old school, and very cathartic. So you can certainly do that, or you may need to go to something to help get rid of the bugs when you are not there to squeeze them.
One of my biggest pests out here in Northern Virginia is slugs. We have very large slugs and lots of them, and they come out in the evenings when it's moist or in the middle of the night, once the dew has settled on all the plants, and they climb at the top of the plants, and they eat the tender new growth, and they eat a lot of it. And they will destroy your lattice crops, and your cabbage, and all that good stuff. So to get rid of your slugs, you can use a product called Sluggo. There is also a product called Escar-Go, and similar other types of soil control methods, and this is approved for organic agriculture.
What we have is a container full of little small pellets, and these are harmless iron phosphate, basically, it's rust and phosphorus together. So this is something that's fine to put in the soil, but for some reasons, slugs are attracted to this mineral combination, and they eat it and it's lethal to them. So this just hurts slugs and snails. They will eat one of these little pellets and they will stop feeding on your vegetables almost the same day. A couple of days after that, they are dead. You won't see the dead slugs, they usually crawl off and hide to die, but you will see that your plants are no longer being eaten.
So this is your slug control method. You can place this underneath of your weed cloth, where the slugs would want to hang out, because it's cool and shady and moist under there. So you can hit them where they live, with a product like that. You can also hit them with some diatomaceous earth.
Diatomaceous Earth is made of diatoms which are little tiny, ancient fossilized sea creatures, and these little guys are like razor sharp broken glass to a bug, and they are not irritating the human skin because they are just so small, but to a bug, this is razor sharp broken glass, and if they crawl through it, they will probably die due to dehydration. If they consume this, it will cut them off from the inside out. So this is effective on virtually every bug, both hard-shelled and soft bodied.
All we have to do to apply diatomaceous earth is simply spread it around. We can shake it in some kind of a shaker can, or we can throw it around with our hands. It's harmless to humans.
Another product we can use is an insect killing soap. There are lots of different soap products on the market. Now, this is something you want to look for, OMRI Listed. OMRI, the Organic Material Review Institute. If they list this as an approved method for organic agriculture, you don't have to do any research beyond that. It's good to go. You can use this all day and all night whether it is a bug killer, or a fertilizer or a fungicide, or whatever. If it's OMRI Listed, then that takes out all the guess work.
So this is a soap which is able to kill bugs. There are many different homemade mixtures that you can research and put together that will kill bugs. Different mixtures will kill different kinds of bugs, and you can spray these soaps on your plants, they won't hurt the plants, but they will knockdown your bugs, or you can buy it already, put together in a spray.
Now for sprays to kill bugs, this is one that I use every year, this product is called Pyola, and this is a pyrethrin and oil mixture. Pyrethrin is a plant compound, and this comes from chrysanthemum flowers. So they take chrysanthemum flowers, and extract this oil, and this oil is able to kill lots of different bugs.
So we follow the directions for mixing so many ounces of this oil to however many gallons of water, and we put it in our sprayer, and we spray our vegetables and lattice and all our different plants with this bug killing solution.
You can get a small hand-held sprayer, that should put a few tablespoons of your bug killer in there, and fill it up with water, pump it up to create pressure, and then hit the trigger, and spray the liquid-spray on your vegetables, or you can go for a larger backpack model, if you have a lot of ground to cover.
This, again is just a large reservoir for your different herbicides and pesticides and fungicides that are approved for organic use. We mix our water with our product, so you'd simply fill the reservoir with the water and the solution, pump this handle to increase the pressure inside the reservoir, and you've got a one with different spray tips that you'd use to trigger to spray your solution on your different vegetables.
Now, this backpack sprayer sprays a little more than just bug death, this can spray fertilizer. We can actually use different organic products as a foliar feed. A foliar feed is where we spray the leaves with a fertilizing mixture, and the plants can absorb the fertilizer directly through their leaves. So we don't have to worry about getting it into the soil, we can send it right into the plants. So that wraps up our organic pest control clip.
Next, we are going to talk about how and when to water your garden.
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