so here at Daley's Nursery we're interested in producing food plants
these are plants that produce what you're going to eat and we want to
reduce the chemicals that we use on our plants so in order to do that we need to
look at alternative ways of controlling pests and diseases a more organic approach
an approach that integrates things into our environment so in doing so we
actually incorporate some of the pests into our growing procedures and
processes our farming practices so what we're going to talk about today is the
good the bad and the ugly so these are the good bugs and the bad bugs and here
at Daley's we have warm humid polyhouses this is where we grow things and
they're really great environments for things like two spotted mites and two
spotted mite is a common plant pest so if you have a look at this plant here
this is a berry it's called a Keriberry and you can see there are some
yellow leaves and then some dark green leaves which is the new growth now these
older leaves were infested with two spotted mites and what we did was we
released some predatory mites into this area of the polyhouse and these have
actually controlled this problem on the plant
they've just predated them they're fed on them we need the two spotted mites to
feed the predatory mites and we get a balance of the two
so what we actually get is a healthy plant and we have a healthy environment
that includes lots of different insects in our environment we also have birds
and reptiles and different animals that visit and live in our polyhouses some
of the reptiles will control slugs the birds will eat insects so they're really
important part of our environment and they actually make our working
environment a better place because we live beside all the things that are part
of our environment and we want to live beside the insects so if you have
insects on your plants the first thing you need to do is to be able to identify them
and in order to do that you actually
need a magnifying glass so I have here these pretty cool glasses
these are magnifying glasses and you can identify pests with these they have a
little light
and they look super funky
and I've got here some leaves of the
Curry bush so in order to see what's infecting these leaves I need to be able
to magnify it
and what I can see using those glasses is that the pests that have infected
these leaves are no longer there so this is old damage it's not current damage
and if you look at these plants these are the curry plants so these also had
an infestation of two spotted mites when we released the predatory mites they
took control of this infestation so the Predators had plenty of food they
feasted on these mites they brought the problem back into balance and you can
see now we have this beautiful new growth on our plant so what we want to
try and help you to understand is that a bit of damage on your plants a few eaten
leaves a little bit of discoloration is not a problem it's actually a part of
our environment and if we want to live in a rich world with lots of insects and
bugs we need to reduce our chemical use we need to stop using blanket
insecticides to control pests and we need to look at alternatives so today
we're going to look at what someone
like bugs for bugs a company
that sells organic pest control live insects to control your bugs can offer
you in your backyard and what we're doing here at Daley's Nursery to
control our insect pests