Pests and diseases - Edible Backyard NZ

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Pests and diseases

A collection of 19 posts

Dear Kath, my tomatoes have blight...

Dear Kath, my tomatoes have blight...

Dear Kath, the tomatoes in my greenhouse are suffering from blight. What can you advise to treat them? Is it a deficiency in the soil or a pest? thanks A deficiency, in this case, of soil microbes, and the solution is simple as. Read through my very simple, tomato growing

December Fruit Tree To Do List

December Fruit Tree To Do List

Fruit trees look kinda static, but they're super dynamic! Hormones, enzymes, sugars - much goes on as they constantly adapt to the wet, dry, windy, hot, cold, pest, pathogens - add to that their innate push to grow you some delicious fruits and there's a lot

Help! Our Garden is Full of Grass Grubs

Help! Our Garden is Full of Grass Grubs

Grass grubs are bronze beetle babies, and as far as pests go, a relatively easy one to balance in the home garden with natural practises such as I champion below. Mostly they reside in lawn - these are grass grubs after all!, but they can also make their way into

Biological Fungicides

Cankers, oozing sap, fruit scab, fruit rot, leaf spots or leaf curl, and are all signs that pathogenic fungi/ bacteria are out competing beneficial fungi/ bacteria, on your fruit trees. It's a numbers game. Simple as that. Whoever owns the space, rules the day. Your job is to

autumn leaves falling in the orchard at ediblebackyard

Boost Your Fruit Trees This Autumn

Leaves are turning gold and starting to fall, marking the end of a cycle of growth and the beginning of another as the leaf donates its goodness back to earth. All those tiny openings left by detached leaves makes it a prime time to get a biological spray on -

homegrown organic broccoli ediblebackyard nz

Monthly gardening advice

Be Cabbage White Butterfly Free!

Summer of '22, I grew brassicas out in the open without any insect mesh, from seedling to finish. I was feeling confident in my parasitic wasp population, and they didn't disappoint. What a turn around! For most of my garden life I haven't bothered growing

gvb's been at my berries

Break The Pest Cycle

Pests are part of a gardening life - especially when your vegie patch is full of all their favourite food. Add to that a bit of stress like drought for instance, and immunity and pest resistance are lowered, fanning the flames and increasing the likelihood of high numbers of sap

The Bio-fungicide Advantage

The Bio-fungicide Advantage

The first signs of summer disease are making themselves known - potential is high after our mild, wet spring. Cool your heels before rushing out to buy a big hitting fungicide and have a read about the bio-fungicide advantage. Bio-fungicides are a gentle, natural solution to disease - they do

use mildewed leaves for mulch, soil life will sort them out

Can I Compost Diseased Plant Matter?

Yes! Yes, you can. Nature specialises in detoxifying and outcompeting pathogens. A compost heap is full of life, more than equipped for this job. Visualise a bunch of pac-men zooming about gobbling up the bad guys and you're not far off it. Further biology enters the fray to

green vegetabl bugs

Coping with Green Vegetable Bugs

The Importance of the Right Name When learning about a pest, begin your journey by finding out it's scientific name. The bug I'm ruminating on today is the Green Vegetable Bug Nezara Viridula, also called green vegetable beetle, stink bug or shield bug. These other names

What to Do About Leaf Curl

Leaf curl will be showing up in your stonefruit about now - spring being the time when fungus comes out to play. My preference is to eliminate trees that religiously go down with severe leaf curl year on year - it signals to me, that they aren't well

a healthy colony of aphids

Monthly gardening advice

Natural Ways With Pests

Heat and harvest come to this - pests. It's easy to malign them, "Damn things!" But pests are not malicious. They've come because you've served dinner. Aphids, leafhoppers, scale, thrips, green vegetable bugs - put a feed out, create the perfect environment

Pests and diseases

How To Prevent + Deal with Garlic Rust

Rust is an airborne, parasitic fungi that makes your plants look, well - rusty! The raised, orangey spots cover the foliage quickly when conditions are ideal and in a severe case, the leaves yellow, shrivel and die. With the foliage unable to convert energy in its usual efficient style, bulbs

Drone shot of edible backyard nz

Preventing + Managing Fungal Disease

By far and away the most common cause of garden disease is airborne fungi. The mild moist conditions of spring set the scene for primary infections of rust, black spot, leaf curl, shot hole, brown rot and other fungal delights. As I write this it's raining and cool,

ladybird on buckwheat

Monthly gardening advice

Get Ready For Psyllids

Boy, did we panic about psyllids when they first arrived on our shores. And rightly so! Our tomato and potato crops got hammered as we figured out how to cope with them. And figure it out we did. We've got it sorted! So moving on from the panic,

Oh Brave New World - My Copper Free Orchard

The early plums are bursting out! The bees are in! Mid season plums are on the move! If copper is your thing then get it on as the buds move. Which means right at the beginning while they're still a ball - at the very first peep-o (blink

bee on verbena bonaresis

A Planting Plan to Entice the Beneficial Insects

Prepare to be amazed at the amount of larvae gobbling, pest destroying action going on around you in the micro. Beneficial insects keep your garden sorted. There's an army on your side: parasitic wasps, hoverflies, various bees and ladybirds, praying mantis, spiders, dragonflies, assassin bugs, lacewings, a variety

The wilts - a very unhappy wilted tomato plant

Help, My Tomato Has Wilted!

There's nothing sadder than a crop gone awry, all that love and care down the tubes. In this case we have a wilted (past the point of recovery) tomato. When something goes awry in the vegie patch look to the obvious things first (I know how you love

Tomato with TPP

Pests and diseases

5 ways to manage Tomato Potato Psyllid

It's the psyllid season. With a potential to wipe out up to 80% of your gorgeous tomato crop it's an important pest to understand. Managing psyllids takes a bit extra, but come on guys - it's tomatoes were talkin' about! Are they worth