On 09/12/2010 20:50, Frank Booth Snr wrote:
Jeff Layman wrote:

I do agree. But if you read Don's gardening articles in Saturday's Daily
Mail Magazine, his mantra is "Chemicals should not be used". That's it -
no argument. And that is why I prefer Buckland to Don; he's a lot more
open minded.

The late Geoff Hamilton held the same viewpoint, yet I don't recall
anyone accusing him of narrow-mindedness at any time.. For the average
size garden you do not need to use chemicals. If you are growing certain
crops eg, strawberries, on a sizeable plot of land, well maybe.

I'm afraid that's idealistic. It doesn't matter whether you have one
plant or a million. if you get something nasty which doesn't respond to
conservative treatment, then you try something more powerful. And that
is especially true if the plant in question is rare, or maybe has
sentimental value.

Around 4 years ago i spotted Brighamia insignis in a local nursery. It
was not cheap, but looked interesting. It grew well, and is now nearly
3 times its original height. But every autumn it appears to get red
spider mite, or something like it, as the leaves turn mottled and dried
up, and there were webs around them.

At first I tried spraying it with water and keeping it in a damp
atmosphere inside a plastic bag (it's on an inside windowsill). That
didn't help - it continued to slowly lose all its leaves. It started to
grow new leaves, and those soon became mottled and dry, too.
Unfortunately at the time there were no effective chemicals available to
the amateur to treat red spider mite, so I resigned myself to watching
the plant slowly die.

A couple of weeks later I was browsing through the insecticides in a
local garden centre and was amazed to find something called Axoris,
containing a chemical "abamectine" effective against red spider mite.
Within 2 weeks of spraying the plant with that, new leaves appeared and
remained healthy. Now I spray as soon as the mottling appears, and
within a short time the plant is healthy again.

--

Jeff