Ahhh ... Root Mealy Bug

hi it's David Taylor alias mr. pelargonium if you like to call me that now I've unfortunately made a startling discovery today that some of my plants have got what's those root mealy bug which is sort of pretty devastating disease the the little sort of almost like mighty larvae of these of these creatures feed off the roots of the plants and leave our right miss in the pots and they weak in the plant will eventually kill it I made the discovery in that I was watering one of my standards and there was a lot of dots white dots appeared and these are the sort of the the dead all that sort of dying little larvae they're no more than a millimeter long and it was quite a devastating discovery because I haven't had this I think I at least once many many years ago and I'm going back about 20 years but I haven't had it certainly for a very long time I've no idea oh it may have got in there often it can only be bought in really on the roots of the plant itself or you could you may have some of the the little larvae all the eggs of these little larvae actually in the soil but they need something to feed on so you're unlikely to actually bring it in with compost and I keep my compost in my garage very clean anyway so there's never any sign of any problems with my fresh compost but we all have a look I'll pull one out I've got several now the strange thing is it seems to have affected more my standards and I've actually had to throw out a couple there is really only one thing you can do destroy the plant because all the infestation is below the soil level the the top of the plant is generally okay so if you're desperately wanting to keep hold of some of these plants you can take cuttings but the plants infected generally not ones that I'm too bothered about losing but one that has got it is this one this large Crystal Palace gym you can see it's a very floppy very weak but the actual bottom of the saucer where I watered it I've seen it all coming out so we'll have a look at that in a minute now one of the things that I have done I've had to sort of pull out all of my plants and have a look and I can't see that there are that many actually infected it's not to say they may not be a very odd egg or a very very small infection right in the root system but nothing that I can see anywhere right now I'm outside now and I'm hopeful that you can see the evidence there's some water that just flushed in there lots of white bits in the base of the source and watered now thankfully we do water independently so I'm not going to get any cross-contamination but yeah that's the little blighters there you can see them all in the base so the first thing we're going to do and there's a source of one was a bit earlier this is in Bleach and then into a weaker bleach solution I don't like don't mind taking half measures so that's going to go in there I certainly don't when it comes to things like this now in the UK we have collections of garden waste and plant material waste so this is going to go in here and I'm just going to take this pot off now we should be able to see the reveal of the state of the root system a bit of a shame but and there we are the typical telltale signs see all these little white sacs here seeing these are all egg sacs it's not actually as badly infected as I thought it was going to be but it is pretty bad is certainly bad enough for me to get rid of and there you can see the the larvae just moving about you know whether my phone is gonna focus that well but it may do a very tiny is one they're moving about just there might be able to see it moving but yeah not good because I'll use a standard polling and ethically knock so that's gonna have to get a good swirl around in my strong solution of bleach as well as being cleaned disinfected and now over to the pot it's the inside of the pot which as you can see the mold particularly the bottom end of the of the pot itself and that's the infestation very good at all I haven't anything like this for yonks for years so it just goes to show it and happened to the to the best of us to say so make sure that's anything loose taken out and straight over to my uncle which is a strong solution of bleach straight into that and you need to make sure keep everything clean it is a bit of a strain great strain but one of those things we all even you know supposedly sort of quite good growers can get can have these problems as well so there we go that's a quick one for today root mealy bug

Channel: The Pelargonium and Geranium Society

Views: 5,337

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

Keywords: Pelargoniums

Id: thBMwwM2zjY

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2018