Aphids suck. Literally. And they poop sugar – a bad combination that can result in stunted and deformed plants, disease transmission, and fungal growth on your plant. They are often born pregnant – female aphids can carry young that are already carrying young, just like Russian nesting dolls – which combined with a life cycle as short as seven days, can give rise to rapid and destructive population increases.
They also seem to come from nowhere. Even in an isolated greenhouse that was allowed to freeze out over the winter, aphids will suddenly show up to ruin your day. Peppers are especially prone to damage from aphids in the greenhouse, especially in the low light, high temperature conditions of early spring.
Pesticides suck, too – even organically approved pesticides are no fun at all to spray. Especially in a diversified greenhouse, trying to scout out and make targeted applications on a few dozen plants creates all kinds of problems, from how to mix up such a small batch of pesticides to how to provide appropriate intervals before worker reentry.
Fortunately, inoculating your transplant production house with beneficial insects early in the season can help suppress pest populations until light and temperature balance out. I’ve had exceptional results with releasing a variety of beneficial insects before scouting or sticky traps turned up any problems.
In fact, releasing beneficials before you see a problem lets the bugs do the scouting for you. If you’ve got a small population of aphids or other prey, a flood of beneficial insects will do a much better job of rooting them out.
Early releases also help you stay ahead of the predator-prey population cycles. Out in the world, prey populations (say, rabbits) increase ahead of the predator population (say, coyotes). As the population of rabbits increases, the population of coyotes does, too. Eventually, the population of rabbits peaks and starts to go down; then there are too many coyotes for the available rabbits, and their population starts to go down, as well.
If you’re using beneficial insects (predators) to control pests (prey), you want to introduce the beneficials when there are less pests than the beneficials can consume. Yes, some of the beneficial insects won’t have enough to eat, but that just makes them highly motivated to root out and kill the pests that are damaging your plants. An early introduction of beneficial insects really helps to keep pest populations from ever getting out of control.
At Rock Spring Farm, on the 43rd latitude in northern Iowa, I liked to flood the transplant house with a variety of beneficial insects around the third week of March. I had great success with the garden packs available from Hydro-Gardens – the “Greenhouse” pack did nice work in my 3,000 square-foot heated greenhouse, with lacewings and ladybugs to attack the aphids, as well as whitefly parasites, thrip predators, and spider mite predators - as well as beneficial nematodes to work on any early fungus gnat larvae.
(Please note: Hydro-Gardens needs to receive orders by noon Mountain time on Thursday in order to ship beneficials the following week, so it’s important to get ahead on placing your order – another reason why it doesn’t pay to wait until you see a problem starting to develop before you put the good bugs in your greenhouse.)
They also seem to come from nowhere. Even in an isolated greenhouse that was allowed to freeze out over the winter, aphids will suddenly show up to ruin your day. Peppers are especially prone to damage from aphids in the greenhouse, especially in the low light, high temperature conditions of early spring.
Pesticides suck, too – even organically approved pesticides are no fun at all to spray. Especially in a diversified greenhouse, trying to scout out and make targeted applications on a few dozen plants creates all kinds of problems, from how to mix up such a small batch of pesticides to how to provide appropriate intervals before worker reentry.
Fortunately, inoculating your transplant production house with beneficial insects early in the season can help suppress pest populations until light and temperature balance out. I’ve had exceptional results with releasing a variety of beneficial insects before scouting or sticky traps turned up any problems.
In fact, releasing beneficials before you see a problem lets the bugs do the scouting for you. If you’ve got a small population of aphids or other prey, a flood of beneficial insects will do a much better job of rooting them out.
Early releases also help you stay ahead of the predator-prey population cycles. Out in the world, prey populations (say, rabbits) increase ahead of the predator population (say, coyotes). As the population of rabbits increases, the population of coyotes does, too. Eventually, the population of rabbits peaks and starts to go down; then there are too many coyotes for the available rabbits, and their population starts to go down, as well.
If you’re using beneficial insects (predators) to control pests (prey), you want to introduce the beneficials when there are less pests than the beneficials can consume. Yes, some of the beneficial insects won’t have enough to eat, but that just makes them highly motivated to root out and kill the pests that are damaging your plants. An early introduction of beneficial insects really helps to keep pest populations from ever getting out of control.
At Rock Spring Farm, on the 43rd latitude in northern Iowa, I liked to flood the transplant house with a variety of beneficial insects around the third week of March. I had great success with the garden packs available from Hydro-Gardens – the “Greenhouse” pack did nice work in my 3,000 square-foot heated greenhouse, with lacewings and ladybugs to attack the aphids, as well as whitefly parasites, thrip predators, and spider mite predators - as well as beneficial nematodes to work on any early fungus gnat larvae.
(Please note: Hydro-Gardens needs to receive orders by noon Mountain time on Thursday in order to ship beneficials the following week, so it’s important to get ahead on placing your order – another reason why it doesn’t pay to wait until you see a problem starting to develop before you put the good bugs in your greenhouse.)
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