Category — Pests

I like to see what gardeners of the past used against pests. Partly it interests me because some of those older pests don’t even seem to be around today; partly I’m curious about  some of those old pesticides that are less toxic (and less expensive) than many of the pesticides we have today. But not always, as this story will reveal.

I recently got several books in the Present-Day Gardening series, which ran from about 1910 to about 1912 (for some reason, they stopped putting dates on the later books in the series). I enjoy these British books for the view they give of gardening a hundred years ago: an intimate look into the varieties and methods British authorities thought made good gardens.

In the Sweet Peas book, I saw my old friend, tobacco spray, recommended for green fly (a British term for aphid). Tobacco was the all-purpose pesticide of the 1800s and early 1900s; many still use it today. Novels from the time before smoking became a public evil talk about asking smokers to sit near the rose bushes, because the smoke helped defend the roses against various bugs and blights.

In Sweet Peas, the first line of defense is supposed to be picking off aphids, because “When this pest becomes comfortably established on the plants it will need all the grower’s patience and perseverance to exterminate it; but it should never be allowed to settle itself so firmly. If a close look-out is kept at all stages of growth, and every fly that is seen is promptly destroyed, the trouble will be lessened materially. It multiplies with extraordinary rapidity, and the descendants of one or two pairs become a crowded city in a week.”

Some things don’t change in a hundred years. Aphids still multiply like crazy, and for organic gardeners, hand-picking (more like squishing, really) is still a good first line of defense.

If this doesn’t work, Horace J. Wright says, then it’s time for snuff (finely powdered tobacco) or a tobacco spray made with paraffin. (Paraffin means kerosene, not the hard wax we call paraffin in the U.S.)

The recipe goes like this: soak two ounces of shag tobacco in one gallon of water. While I don’t use such large quantities, this is the basic recipe for a tobacco spray. Adding the kerosene/paraffin solution sounds a bit more complicated: you boil 4 ounces of soft soap in one pot, and 4 ounces of quassia  in another.

Quassia is a West Indian tree noted for its insecticidal properties, so here I have to wonder if maybe you couldn’t just leave the other items out of this recipe and still have success.  Interestingly, quassia protects beneficials such as bees and ladybugs, while it kills plant-predator bugs. Quassia is also used for human health; readers of Louisa May Alcott may remember that Rose, the heroine of one of her books, was given a quassia cup by her sailor/doctor uncle, returned from foreign climes. If I recall rightly, Rose was pale and thin from loss of appetite. In the West Indies, these cups were filled with water, which was allowed to sit until it leached some of the properties from the wood. Then the water was drunk for fevers and indigestion.

Okay, so now we’ve got the tobacco solution, the quassia solution, the soap solution. (As with many old recipes, you don’t get the exact amounts of water the quassia and soap are supposed to be cooked in.) You put them in a gallon and a half of water: “place on the fire, and when the whole lot is boiling furiously, remove the pot, put in a wineglass full of paraffin, and stir vigorously; the working in of the oil when the water is boiling hard will go far to ensure perfect amalgamation.” They wrote so nicely in those days. Perfect amalgamation. Sounds like an album title. Too bad you’d be inhaling poisonous kerosene fumes while making that perfect amalgamation.

The final solution is sprayed on in a mist, preferably after the sun has gone down.

Without the kerosene/paraffin, this spray would be nontoxic to plants and soil, at least. With the kerosene, it’s not only poisonous, but stinky. We often romanticize former gardens, but it’s not all good stewardship and nontoxicity with these old-time pesticides. It wasn’t in the U.S., either.  I asked my father once about the treatment he and his father gave the apple orchard every year.  “Arsenate of lead,” was his reply.

Reference:

Sweet Peas, Horace J. Wright, J.C. and E.C. Jack,Present-Day Gardening Series, 1910

Sometimes you can turn bad things can turn into good things. That’s what some of the farmers in India. are doing.

A few years ago, studies discovered pesticides in the sodas being made in India. The water used to make soft drinks was contaminated.

Once the word got out, people stopped drinking soda, but they still kept buying it. Why? Pesticides farmers use on their crops, bought from the big companies, were expensive, and they needed to be diluted, a part of the process where it’s easy for the farmer to take in a dose of pesticides, especially when there’s no money for expensive equipment.

So the farmers had a good idea: they started using soft drinks as a pesticide spray on their chili and cotton crops. They figured the sodas were a perfect formula for cheap, pre-diluted crop sprays, 80% cheaper than buying the commercial product.

Now a few years have passed, and Coke and Pepsi avow that all pesticides have been taken out of the manufacturing process and their drinks. They say that using sodas as crop sprays is ridiculous and ineffective.

But you know what? Results proved them wrong. The farmers noticed a definite drop in problems with insects. So far, the theory is that the sugar attracts ants, which eat the larvae of the insects that might be a potential problem.

If you have repeated problems with insects, you might want to try out this “pesticide” yourself. You certainly can’t beat the price.

But, as it says in the poison-label boilerplate, don’t drink it. It could be bad for your health.

(I got this info from David G. Wiliams’s newsletter, Alternatives.)

My cat thinks the containers I plant most of my bulbs in are a perfect size for curling up; doubtless the soil is extra-warm for her comfort. My own comfort is disturbed by this, as she tends to lie in these containers just as the bulbs are trying to come up.

While I don’t usually consider my cat a pest, in this case I do. Shooing her down from the container of choice is only a temporary solution, as, like most cats,  she obeys me for a moment to get a peaceful life, then returns to her comfy container-nest the moment my back is turned.

In a garden catalogue, I found a picture of a cat-repeller, a sort of grid of plastic spikes. Since I’m cheap, and I’m not mad about the looks of plastic in my garden,  I pondered what an alternative might be. I had the brainstorm: break up small sticks and poke them into the container at random, until there are no cat-sized spaces left. (I use sticks about four to eight inches long, and not much bigger around than my little finger, though I’m not scientific about this, as you can see by the picture. I like the looks of the irregular lengths and thicknesses. If this bothers you, you could get precise about it.)

The sticks work well, blend into the garden when the bulbs are small, and completely disappear by the time the bulbs get to be full-sized.

You can also use the stick cat-repellent in the ground,  and it works just as well for small tender seedlings as it does for emerging bulbs. Free, easy, and ecologically correct.

***

Having said all this, I probably shouldn’t show the following picture. I shouldn’t tell you that, when one pot of tulips died down, I left it on my porch, unprotected by little sticks.

Because my cat loves it so much. I found her there almost every morning. It’s the perfect place for her to curl up.*

*See my mission statement for a complete explanation. It’ll be at the bottom of the page this link takes you to.

Proof that narcissus has some pests: something bit a chunk out of ‘Minnow’

I found out something at my local nursery that I hadn’t believed possible: some deer will eat narcissus.

I’d always recommended narcissus as the ultimate pest-proof plant: they are poisonous, and apparently that poison makes itself known through its awful taste.  I personally had never had any problems with narcissus pests, nor did I know anybody who had.

But as I stood in line with my multiple bulb pots (shamefully late for planting but willing to rely on the kindness of bulbs), I heard the guy behind the counter advising the woman ahead of me. Apparently, some of her daffodils had been disappearing. “It could be deer,” said the man behind the counter.

“I didn’t think deer ate narcissus,” I said, surprised. “I didn’t think anything did.”

“Older deer won’t,” he explained, “but the younger ones who haven’t learned yet - sometimes they’ll eat them.”

The practical change I’ve made since hearing this is to give my narcissus the same deer-discouraging treatment I give most of my plants: enough spraying with Liquid Fence or Deer Off to keep deer at bay most of the time; it’s the best you can hope for, really.

The old belief I lost in that checkout line was more than balanced by the three long-held beliefs it reaffirmed. First: local nurseries are the first place to go for the plants, information, and tools you need to garden well in your own area. Second, never assume you know everything about something, even if you’ve had a lot of experience. (This is a tough one for me.) And the third belief? Happenstance conversations in public places can become illuminating exchanges: what Whitman called “letters from God in the street”.

Sacred plant. Noxious weed. Beautifier of the poor. Devil’s drug. People have a lot of takes on morning glories.

The Aztecs called a related morning glory, Turbina corymbosa, ololiuqui, and put it in their sacred paintings. It was considered a male plant, one which had a close connection with the female plant called Mother of Water (botany unknown). Zapotecs grind seeds of  Ipomoea purpurea  species together with Turbina corymbosa–or they did as of a few decades ago. The meal is soaked in water, and the infusion is taken by shamans to divine the cause of an illness, a disturbance in town, or find a lost object.

In high school, my friends and I put morning glory seeds in a blender with some water. The resulting mess provided us with no more cosmic result than nausea. It’s likely that the active ingredients need to soak to be extracted by water. It’s also true that plant drugs taken in a sacred setting behave differently than ones that are not. Teenagers trying to get high in the kitchen while the parents are away is not perhaps the most sacred of settings.

While we were doing that, other people were trying their best to keep morning glory plants entirely out of their orbits. They were pests, noxious weeds, something that could take over a field. “There are three annual Morning-glory species that infest fields and gardens throughout the greater part of the United States,” cautions Edward Rollin Spencer, in no flattering tones.

Clearly this is an eastern U.S. book. Out here in dry-summer territory, it’s easy to get rid of morning glories: don’t water. That and a freeze pretty much takes care of it.

But in the fertile, rained-on fields east of the Rockies, morning glory seems to have felt like an ever-present danger to Spencer. Even his translation of the Latin name sounds nasty. “…Ipomoea is from the Greek and means wormlike…Purpurea…means purple. So Ipomoea purpurea L. means the purple-flowered plant that crawls like a worm.”

Actually, the proper name may be Ipomoea violacea. I was unable to discern which is most current, but since my handy at-home reference, J.L. Hudson, uses purpurea, that’s what I’m using here. Purpurea or violacea, it means the same thing.

“Like snakes, those slender vines crawl up over the plants they select for their trellises, and soon the big Morning-glory leaves are shading the leaves of the trellising plants, and very soon after that those glorious flowers will be smiling on all the world like a big woman obstructing the view of a small boy at the movies.”

Sinister.

Next post: Beautifier of the poor, and devil’s drug.

REFERENCES:

Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann, Plants of the Gods, Healing Arts Press, 1992

William Emboden, Narcotic Plants, Collier Books/Macmillan, 1979, pg. 95-97

Edwin Rollin Spencer, All About Weeds, Dover edition 1974; originally published 1940, 1957 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, pg. 188