Pests of garden plants

Aphids

admin0 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:53:54 +0000

Aphids, or plant-lice, and their congeners, are indicated by an unhealthy appearance in plants; the leaves and young shoots curl up, and multitudes of ants, which seem to feed on their secretions, are seen about the stems. A remedy is found in repeatedly syringing the leaves and stems with tobacco or lime-water, or with gas-tar water when tahat can be obtained; but plants should be carefully examined in may, and the winged parent of the Psilla Pyra, and its congeners, destroyed before they have deposited their eggs. Lady-birds (coccinelidae) render great service in destroying myriads of aphides, which ought to insure them the protection of gardeners. Tobacco smoke, dispersed through a house by fumigator, and Gishurst’s compound are effectual in clearing plants of green fly; but if fumigation is resorted to, all apertures must be effectually stopped, so that the smoke may be retained within the structure, and so throughly do its work.

When the aphids, or green fly, collects in great numbers on the end of a shoot of any plant, such as the rose, covering it with a thick external coating of insect life, it has been found that they may be easily removed by means of aphid brushes. These brushes are made in the form of scissors. At the end of each arm is a narrow brush formed of soft bristles. The brushes are closed on the infested shoot a little below the insects, and then drawn upwards and along it. Two or three applications of the brush will very neatly, if not entiraly, remove all the aphids without doing any injury to the shoot. Sometimes the aphids brush is made in the form of sheep shears-that is to say, an elastic bow, with a brush at the end of each arm. Pressure only of the thumb and fingers is required to bring the brushes together, and the shoot is cleared as before by drawing the brushes along it.

Slugs

admin0 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:53:20 +0000

Of the slugs there are several varieties, but the most destructive in gardens are the small white and small black slugs, which bury themselves in the ground or under leaves and come out in the night-time to feed. To destroy these, take fresh lime in a powdered state, put it into a coarse bag and after nightfall or before sunrise, dust the ground where slugs are about: every slug touched with the smallest particle of the lime will die at once. If the weather is wet, the power of the lime will soon be destroyed but if the ground is strewed in the evening with fresh cabbage-leaves, the slugs will hide under these and may be destroyed in the morning.

Snails

admin0 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:52:51 +0000

To prevent snails crawling up walls and trees, they must be looked for, picked off by the hand and killed. If a thick paste is made with train oil and soot, and the bottom of the wall is daubed with it, an effectual barrier is formed over which no snails will attemp to pass.

Red spider

admin0 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:52:18 +0000

This is one of the most baneful insect pests that the gardener has to deal with either in the open air or in greenhouses or hothouses, in which it is very prevalent when they have been kept too hot or too dry. There are various acari or mites which infest and injure plants, but this is accounted the most prevalent and therefore the worst of them. They are almost invisible even to the keenest vision, but their presence is indicated by the state of the leaves on which they are, and which present a burnt or scorched appearance, being brown, red, or yellowish in color in patches, or over the entire leaf. Greenhouse walls should be dressed with a mixture of soft soap, sulphur, and clay, beat up to the consistency of paint with warm water and the same dressing may be used for trees. Fumigation with flowers of sulphur vaporised on hot plates is also useful, the houses, pits, etc, being carefully closed while the work of destruction is in progress. After fumigation the plants should be well syringed from time to time with fresh clean water.

The pests of the garden

admin0 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:51:13 +0000

Every animal or creature endowed with life, that it has pleased the almighty in his infinite wisdom to create, has, without doubt, its useful purpose to serve, and yet how many of them are, and must be, regarded by man as ‘pests of the garden’- plagues that often hinder the progress of plant life, or destroy it outright, of which man would fain rid himself at a single stroke could he do so, even as one of the Caesars wished that the entire roman people had but one common neck, so that he might disencumber himself of the nation that groaned under his oppressive rule in a moment by just one sweeping blow of a trenchant sword.

If each and everything that is reckoned as a garden pest has some god given mission to carry out, it is natural to inquire what that mission may be. Is it to rouse God’s masterpiece to greater industry, greater watchfulness, and greater care than he would otherwise be disposed to employ were it all plain sailing-progress without a stumble over nature’s field, as easy as the passage of a ship over a sea scars rippled into wavelets by the gentle breathing of a western wind under a cloudless sky? We are taught and told that at the Fall God cursed the ground for man’s sake, and permitted thorns and thistles to grow in rank array among the herps that the earth up to this point had bountously yielded to furnish man with food. Man had to live a life of industry and toil, and is it not possible that the thorns and thistles were allowed to mingle with the herps of the field as blessings in disguise to compel him to that industry and toil which god had imposed on him as part of the penalty that he had to pay for his sin of disobediance to God’s comment? And if we can accept this view it is possible to accept the other also.

But be this as it may, it is impossible to deny that some of the animals that are classed among garden pests are useful in many ways that a taughtful mind will readily recognize. For example, let us take the mole which works on scene and hidden underground, and only marks his track and leaves his traces in the tiny hillocks, whose upheaval on Earth’s surface is caused by the earth that it removes from his galleries and passages, made by the little excavator as he works his way in darkness through the soil. The mole eats roots, it is true, and disturbs growing crops if it makes its passages under the ground in which they happen to be; but, on the other hand, his workings promote the drainage of the surface soil, and admits the air into the soil, and the mounds of earth which it throws up, when scattered over the surface, and especially over the surface of grassland, acts as a fertilizer, and promotes the growth of the grass. Thus moles are useful, and possibly everything that has life, and is endowed with capability of motion, has its use could we divine it.

Among pests of the garden in a secondary degree must be reckoned dogs and cats; dogs are more easily kept out, and may be trained to avoid being harmful to the ground, but cats, and especially our neighbor’s cats, having a propensity to meddle with ground that has been newly turned and made up, can not be so easily managed. Means and modes of checking the inroads of cats will be found in the pages that immediately follow, and also of dealing with mice and moles, which complete the list of four footed creatures that do damage to the garden in one way or another.

Birds are highly detrimental to the well being of the garden. Fowls, if they unfortunately affect an enterance, play havoc by scrapping and scratching in quest of insect food, by digging shallow pits in dryish mould wherein to dust themselves, and by helping themselves to any green stuff that may be growing in a garden, especially the cabbage tribe, turnips, etc. Then some kinds of birds do infinite damage to fruit, quickly clearing even a well-laden tree of cherries in an incredibly short time; others, again, do damage to the young buds, this embowel promising pea-pods, strip currant bushes of their fruit, nip off the tops of young peas just above ground, and do much other damage which some say is counter balanced by the service rendered by some in clearing away caterpillars. The frequent discharge of a gun is the best deterrent for birds, but other ways of dealing with them will be shown presently.

The chief pest of the garden, however, are to be found among insects. The caterpillars of the white butterfly honeycomb our summer cabages; other caterpillars infest gooseberry and currant bushes; american blight (aphis lanigera) injures our apple trees; green and black fly batten on the tender shoots of a large variety of growing plants, including roses; earwigs lurk in the bloom of roses, dahlias, and other flowers that afford a hiding place for them; thrip red spider, and scale do an infinity of harm in greenhouses; and wasps, etc, eat our stone fruit. It is unnecessary to prolong the catalouge of insect pests. It is enough to say that suggestions for checking the ravages of many of them are offered in the fifth portion of this volume. It will be understood that it is only the ordinary garden plagues, and such as come immedeately under the notice of gardeners, that are touched on. Such insects as the potato beetle, which gave such trouble in america, and the phylloxera vitis, which at times has wrought such ravages on the vines in France, are not mentioned, for want of room. In a book of limited space it is impossible to deal with everything but it may be said that most things have been dealed with which would come under the notice of the ordinary gardener in his ordinary work.