Natural Pest Control

If you have ever gardened in any way you know that munching insects and caterpillars are inevitable.  In the case of butterfly gardens, those caterpillars aren't pests but butterflies to be.  But you don't want caterpillars in your vegetable garden. You don't want aphids and white flies in any garden. Squash bugs are a problem as well. Pests can be pesky

I've written before about the challenges of the tomato horn worm in my aquaponic gardens.  If you missed it, you can read it here There Will Be Pests.   Aquaponics gardening presents pest control challenges similar to that faced by organic gardeners.  You can't use conventional or toxic pest control because you will kill your fish.  Without the fish, your aquaponics garden is merely hydroponic.  So like any gardener first I asked around other gardeners I knew were growing with success (that is to say I've actually see their gardens) and then I hit the interwebs to see what I could see.

In both instances I found one common ingredient to an all natural pest control spray.....hot peppers!  I just love hot peppers and hot any spicy food.  I guess I would make a terrible insect because it turns out many insects don't care for the oils in peppers.  So, I decided to cook up my very own all natural pest spray.  I started with hot peppers and then I figured if garlic would keep vampires away maybe it would work on common garden pests as well.  In my thinking it couldn't hurt and at the least I would not be infested with vampires. After a little more digging around, I discovered that garlic is also used to repel mosquitoesand fleas.  I don't have a problem with fleas.  Because I live in South Florida where the mosquito is the state bird, I figured this was just a bonus.  I took some ideas from both Dr. Dirt and a local master gardener to come up with my all natural pest spray.

First, I tossed some jalepeno peppers in my little food processor along with a few cloves of garlic, thusly:

After I alternately used the chop and grind features I had a fairly coarse puree with an extremely pungent aroma.  It is a good thing I like the smell of peppers and garlic because this lingered for days. 

Next I put the puree in a clean glass quart jar that had a tight fitting lid.  I added enough water to bring it up to the top and then placed it outside in the sun to make "tea".

Because we have such mild weather in February, the temperature was 84°F the day I put the jar out.  I set it out in the morning and left it until the afternoon of the following day.  The water was a bit cloudy.  When I opened the jar you could absolutely smell the garlic and peppers.  I wish I could give you a link to the smell because it was certainly strong.

I brought the "tea" back inside and strained it using my tea strainer.  Because I didn't have any more clean quart bottles I strained it into some smaller bottles for storage.  I applied it undiluted to the collards that had the worst aphid infestation.  I just poured the "tea" into a clean spray bottle, added a drop of soap (as a surfactant and additional anti-insecticidal) and sprayed away.  As a preventative measure, I sprayed the beds next to the bed that was already infested with a diluted solution of the tea. I emptied the small bottle into a quart spray bottle, added two drops of soap, and topped it off with water. 

I used this with success on tomatoes for white fly, collards and broccoli for aphids, and kale seedlings and cilantro seedlings as a preventative measure.  I applied early in the day to avoid any risk of leaf burn.  I felt pretty confident that the pepper/garlic mixture wouldn't burn the leaves but I was concerned about the soap I had added as a surfactant.

The good news is that the pests were controlled and the fish in the aquaponic systems were not harmed.  I am thinking that I will use this tea alternately with neem as a preventative.

What do you use for all natural pest control?  I'd love to hear if anyone else uses peppers and garlic or neem.

There Will be Pests

An early morning check of one of my systems really pissed me off.  Oh the fish were doing well, the bed was flooding and draining properly, most plants looked great except.......................the tomato.  Leaves were eaten and it was covered in little flecks of bug poo.

The tomato hornworm had struck overnight (or since my last check yesterday afternoon).  This isn't my picture, but this is what they look like.

This photo is from University of Colorado

I have to show you the picture someone else took because I was so angry I immediately hunted them all down and squished them until they were DEAD.  In a survival garden, it is the gardener that will survive, not the unwanted visitors.  Pests such as the hornworm must die, immediately.  My frenzy did not subside until the last hornworm was nothing but a green mess.

Like all gardens, aquaponics gardens have pests.  Because of the fish component, you cannot just spray poison on your plants.  Even without the presence of fish, I don't like to spray poison because I really don't want to end up eating it.  There are several ways to approach pest control in your aquaponic garden.  The cheapest is the method I employed on the hornworms.  That means searching the plant, pulling the pest off and squishing it or cutting it with shears or any other means of physical demise of the pest.  If your garden is small and your amount of time for pest control large, this is the most common method.

However, if you have a large gardens this might not be practical.  At our Together We Stand gardens, we use the pick and squish method when we have a large number of volunteers and a small number of pests.  This pick and squish method works great for squash bugs as well as those dreaded hornworms.  However, our most common method is the application of a biological pesticide such as Bacillus thuringiensis.  This is a bacteria that naturally occurs in some soils.  This bacteria is highly toxic to many caterpillars and other garden pests, but it is safe for higher life forms (that means you, your fish, your dog, your chickens, your cats, etc).  It can be found most commonly under the name DiPel. This is what we use when the pests outnumber the volunteers.  It is kinda stinky, so you have been warned. If your garden is organic but not aquaponic, you can use DiPel and keep your organic status.  You do have to be careful with the application if your garden has an area for butterfly gardening.  While butterflies are not normally part of a survival garden, their nectar plants are commonly planted in the garden area to attract pollinators. You can bet the drain and flow system that housed those hornworms is getting a dose of DiPel!

You can also use companion plants as pest deterrents.  My father always planted marigolds around his garden.  I hated the smell of the marigolds and he always assured me that most pests agreed with me and would stay out of the garden because they hated marigolds as well.  This year I tested the marigolds I despise so much in the NFT tubes above one of my flood and drain grow beds.  Very little pest problems at all  Marigolds are famous for warding off nematodes (which are not a problem in aquaponic gardens since you are not using soil) but they worked very well for whitefly too! While the plants near the marigolds still attracted a few aphids, it was nothing like the aphids that tried to flock to other areas of the gardens.  So like them or not, marigolds are here to stay in my garden.

Just like any garden, the aquaponic garden must be walked at least once a day during growing season to check for pests and arrange for their demise when found.

Got any ideas on organic pest control?  Share them with me!