This OLD TIME SECRET Saved Our Tomatoes from Aphids! NO Chemicals, No Soap!

hey everybody welcome back to living tradition's Homestead we're spending some time out in the greenhouse this evening because we have something to talk to you guys about some things that we've learned over the last month or so and some things that we think are worth teaching you guys about because of how great they worked here in the greenhouse the last Greenhouse video that we brought to you well one of them anyway was when we were stringing up the tomatoes here and we were putting the tomato cage to support the pepper plants and in that video we mentioned that we were starting to have some problems with aphids and since then you guys the problem exploded in the Tomato area and nearly killed all of our tomato plants right now luckily it pretty much stayed over in the Tomato area we didn't have much of an aphid problem anywhere else in the greenhouse but for some reason the tomato plants you guys decimated by the aphids to the point where honestly I really thought we were going to have to pull all the tomato plants so that it didn't spread to everything else and I was going to have to just go the rest of the summer without growing any tomatoes so today we want to talk with you about like the whole process of things that we tried to get things under control and we'll talk to you about what worked and what didn't work and why we didn't do some other things that other people try spoiler alert almost all of the aphids are gone off of the tomato plants we used something to fix that that we've never used before many of you have probably never even heard of using this before but I guarantee it's something that you already have in your house and no it's not dish soap and all those things it's something completely different so let's walk around a little bit we're going to talk to you about all the different things we tried all the things that we thought about trying but decided not to and why we made those decisions our battle with aphids started just about the time that Kevin left to be with his dad during his dad's open heart surgery in Kansas City he was gone for nearly two weeks and I was taking care of the entire Homestead by myself and I was just kind of doing as much as I could to keep everything under control including the greenhouse plants and the garden plants I started noticing that there were some aphids and at first I thought well you know uh a few aphids isn't that big of a deal a lot of times healthy plants aren't affected and so I ignored that for several days uh but after that I saw that they were reproducing pretty rapidly and over the course of a week I treated all of the plants indiv ually Leaf by leaf with a homemade insecticidal soap remedy and it seemed to knock them back a little bit and I thought our problems were over but by the time Kevin came home from Kansas City we were looking at the plants and they the plants themselves just looked terrible there was a lot of black sticky stuff on all of the leaves the tomatoes that had been forming there was black sticky spots on there and the plants themselves were droopy and kind of wilty and they were really just being affected by the aphids that had been on there already and the ones that were still living on there they continued to reproduce and reproduce and were still taking over the plants that is when we decided that we would order um a a round of 1500 ladybugs now I don't want to spray poison on these plants I want to attract beneficial insects that will eat the aphids that will create a kind of nice ecosystem in here that they can they can live in here and thrive in here from year to years so we ordered a batch of ladybugs now we ordered the ladybugs on Amazon and most of the time we get our packages pretty quickly from Amazon unfortunately this package of ladybugs got lost in the mail and there was no other ladybugs available that we could find so we had no choice but to just wait for them to arrive during that time we did try tried the insecticidal soap another time and it may have helped a tiny bit but not a whole lot by the time the ladybugs actually arrived you guys the aphids were completely out of control on top of that because the ladybugs got lost in the mail by the time they arrived there were about 40 ladybugs alive in the package out of the 1,500 that we had ordered we reached out to the company that we bought the ladybugs from they were very understanding they apologized they Al let us know they were completely out of ladybugs and couldn't send us anymore for about another two weeks well we knew that we didn't have two weeks left with these plants we knew that if we didn't do something pretty quickly the aphids were going to kill these plants so we told the company send us the new ladybugs when you get them uh we did find another company that could get us some in about a week we also ordered some eggs for some Green Lace Wings all of those were going to take about a week to arrive so we start started looking for what we could do during that week uh without just spraying poison on the plants because we didn't want all those bugs to die after they finally arrived now during all of this time I started doing something very nerdy I started carrying around with me an empty Tic Tac container and every time I saw a ladybug anywhere I was on the homestead I captured that ladybug put it in my Tic Tac container ran over to the greenhouse and put them on the uh tomato plantss I know that sounds ridiculous but you guys I was probably catching you know five 10 15 a day and relocating them to the greenhouse and these tomato plants so because I had done that over and over I really even though these plants were in such terrible condition I knew that they would start laying eggs they would start uh their larae would hatch and start eating the aphids I also started seeing a lot more spiders in here which is really great the dragonfly started coming in here which was really great and just more and more beneficial insects so as I was looking online like what can I do what can I do to protect these plants that's not going to kill all of these beneficial insects that are already in here I was really coming up with nothing but because by this time there were just so many aphids not a trillion lady bugs would have eaten all the aphids that were on here but I just didn't want to spray them with chemicals I've used neem oil before but I didn't want to use that because that will repel the good insects I didn't want to use ammonia I didn't want to use vinegar and you guys I didn't want to use uh diet Tous Earth either because that will kill the ladybugs but I needed to do something so I came across an article and Kevin had come across an article also that when your roses are completely overtaken by aphids the best thing you can do is to just take your hose and a in a really strong stream of water and just spray the aphids off of all your roses because the aphids when you do that their mouth Parts break off of their body parts and so even if they're still alive when they spray off they can't hurt your plants again if they crawl back up your PL your plants so we decided to try that and you guys the first morning that I sprayed all of these tomato plants down with the hose is you know a pretty good stream both front and back both rows you guys the ground was just crawling with aphids there were zillions and trillions of apids on the ground I cannot even believe how many came off of there but by that evening I could tell that that wasn't enough even though I had sprayed off so many aphids they were still all over the plants they were on the blossoms they were on the UND sides of all the leaves so we knew we needed something else so during that time we were literally spending like hours a day looking online for other things that would help with the apids even though we were seeing quite a bit of success with spraying them off um it still wasn't enough there was one day we were looking at articles to be honest at this point I don't even remember if it was Sarah that found it or I that found it we may have both found it around the same time but there was an article that we found that said using milk on your plants spraying milk on your plants would kill the aphids it works almost like an insecticidal soap where because milk kind of gets sticky when it dries um it will suffocate the the aphids as it dries on the leaves and we thought well we've got a dairy cow we've got pretty much an unlimited supply of milk if we want it why not give it a try so that night uh we came out with our hand pump sprayers filled with milk 50 % milk 50% water and we started spraying all of our plants with milk now this won't kill the ladybugs it won't kill the lace Wings it won't kill any of the other insects that we wanted to keep around but you guys the next morning we started to see just a dramatic difference in the amount of living aphids on the plants uh you could see there were still aphids on there but the ones that were on there were mostly dead so that's when we decided that we were going to start to do a rotation of every morning we would come out we would spray the plants off like Sarah did uh to really rinse rinse the milk and the dead aphids and hopefully a bunch of live aphids off and then every evening we would start coming out with pump sprayers and we would spray down the plants we literally came we'd spray the plants and we'd come back we'd lift the leaves up we'd spray again and we were doing that every night with milk to try to kill all of the aphid so we were having great success spraying down the plants but you guys I can tell you one thing spraying all of your plants every night with milk is messy it is really messy and you go in first of all smelling like milk yeah and just like sticky and nasty so uh one day we were just scrolling through YouTube like many of you do and we came across another channel that we watch from time to time the millennial Gardener and he was using a fogger in his garden uh it's a machine that well let me show you what we ended up buying we ended up buying a fogger it looks like this now he had a battery operated one and actually they don't sell that one anymore so we ended up buying this one on Amazon but what this does is it sprays whatever liquid you put in here it comes out like a fog yeah and instead of having to like lift all the leaves up because it's like a fog you can just walk around and like spray and it like Mists everything it gets the tops of the leaves the backs of the leaves it just does an amazing job we were able to put our milk mixture into this and spray all of the plants and you guys it started to work miracles here in the greenhouse it was really amazing to watch this work and just create this like uh Mist almost that you would put on the plants and it would rise up it was really amazing and it didn't make the plants really sopping wet one thing that tomato plants don't like is to be wet so we were concerned about spraying them off every morning although we did read as well that milk is a natural fungicide on the plants as well so that made us feel a little bit better that at least what we were spraying on hopefully wasn't going to cause a fungal problem so the fogger itself didn't leave the plants dripping wet which was really great shortly after we started using that fogger the second round of ladybugs arrived so we were able to release those and those uh Green Lace Wing eggs arrived and we were able to put them out so that their larae would have and start eating all of the aphids as well by that point because we had been doing the milk and water treatment we had far less aphids in here and the beneficial insects were really able to kind of help keep things under control by that point we had enough beneficial insects and few enough U of the aphids that now things were starting to work the way we had hoped in the first place right so today is an exciting day because not only have we not needed to spray the aphids in the morning and use the milk mixture at night for a couple of days because things are starting to turn around now we still may do it once a week or so going forward just to be safe sure but the replacement order of lady bugs arrived today and so it's late in the evening now we're going to release the those ladybugs with you guys and hopefully they'll help just like annihilate the problem Al together now one thing we've learned by now releasing a couple rounds of ladybugs in here is that if you release the ladybugs first of all it's best to release them in the evening for a couple reasons we can put the sides of the greenhouse down overnight which really helps them stay in here but also it's nice and cool in the evening but we've learned that if if the plants are dry like they are right now the ladybugs be because they've been shipped in the mail they're thirsty they want to seek out water so if we want them to stay on the tomato plants the best thing we can do is make sure that the tomato plants are wet at the time that we release them so before we release the ladybugs we're actually going to use our fogger machine so that you guys can see how that works we're just going to put water in it but we do want to show you how it works so we can spray all the plants get them nice and wet and then we can release the ladybugs and they'll get a nice drink and hopefully find some nice dinner hopefully they're hungry and they can eat a bunch of these aphids now this sprayer or this fogger that we got it's pretty loud it's about as loud as like a shop vac and it's also not super light because it holds 2 gallons of liquid the reason we like this one is because it's got kind of a hose that you can move around and we have found that it's actually easier to do this with the two of us I carry around the The Jug part and Sarah uses the sprayer part to spray the plants you probably could do it by yourself but as long as we like working together and we get along pretty well we thought we'd just do it together and that's the way that we've been doing it when we do the plants and it really makes things a lot easier so we're going to get spraying again this is just water our goal tonight is just to get enough water on these plants that the ladybugs want to stick around [Applause] [Music] oh look [Music] [Applause] [Music] Las oh yeah [Music] [Music] y isn't that fogger cool uh it really dides a good job now because it puts out such a fine Mist though it does dry pretty quickly which is actually what you want when you're playing like the milk or anything else so we decided we're going to also run our irrigation system for just a couple minutes we already watered today but we're going to water again just enough so that the top of the soil is good and moist so again these ladybugs will have something to drink when they first get released so now we are ready to start releasing the ladybugs it is pretty amazing that the can come in the mail and you guys these this batch looks like most of them are alive you can see them crawling around in there a lot of them are huddled up right at the top hoping to come out soon they send them with um a little bit of you know something inside of there to give them something to drink and maybe a little bit of something to eat but they are anxious to get out of this bag so I'm going to go ahead and and cut the top off of the bag and then I'm going to just kind of um move from plant to plant and let some of them off onto the uh leaves of all of the plants and just kind of move around the greenhouse until all the plants have some ladybugs on them and then inevitably there are always some that kind of get stuck in the bag not stuck but they stay in the bag and then overnight I'll just lay that down on in one of the pots so that they can all crawl out but I'm going to go ahead and try to tap some most of these down from the top so that I can cut the top off and start letting them out [Music] so Sarah's going to continue to go plant by plant just releasing some of those ladybugs on every plant until we have at least some on every one of the tomato plants while we were using that fog we started to see a lot of the Green Lace Wings the actual adults start to fly around which is great because that means not only did the eggs hatch but now they've reached maturity and hopefully start laying eggs of their own so that was really encouraging to see that was the first time we've really seen a bunch of them but you know they look they match the plants so they're hard to see we have seen a lot of ladybugs in here from the other rounds of ladybugs and the like wild ones that Sarah caught and put in here here we're also seeing a lot of ladybug nymphs as we work in here the last few days so that's really good you guys I really think we're creating a good environment here in the greenhouse for them now we do have some harvesting to do in the greenhouse we're losing daylight for today so we're not going to do any harvesting until tomorrow morning but we're going to bring you guys along while we do some of that in the morning and then we'll look back we'll be able to take a look and see how many of these ladybugs are on the plants ultimately when you do this you're going to lose some of your ladybugs they're going to fly away they're going to just die whatever but uh as long as we end up with enough of them in here that we can create a good colony of them uh we'll be really happy at the end of the season this year our goal is to kind of create an environment for them where they can overwinter um we're looking into different kind of setups for doing that and giving them kind of natural areas where they can overwinter in here so hopefully next year as soon as the plants start to come alive and as soon as the aphids start to come alive uh ladybugs are also coming alive and just starting to take care of them right off the bat so we'll see you guys in the morning for some harvesting uh we're looking forward to a good harvest in the morning well good morning everybody we're back out in the greenhouse this morning we're going to take a look around we're going to see if all of those ladybugs kind of stuck around overnight I'm pretty sure they did because we had the sides down uh hopefully they stick around all day today as well and they are starting to do their jobs here in the greenhouse after we're done looking for the ladybugs we do have some harvesting to do in the greenhouse this morning so we thought we would take you along for that well just taking an initial look around at all the tomato plants there are lots of ladybugs still on these plants you can see on this plant that there are just a ton of the ladybugs still on here and that that is a really great thing what we're hoping for is that these ladybugs will not only eat the aphids but we're really hoping that they'll find a really wonderful place to lay eggs because their larae once they are hatched those are the ones that eat so many of the aphids all right it looks like the ladybugs are doing their job we've also seen some of the Green Lace Wings over there so it looks like everybody's doing their job over on that half of the greenhouse so we're going to start harvesting over on this half I know for a fact that there are peppers to harvest there's green beans there's cucumbers there's zucchini uh maybe some of the yellow crook neck I haven't looked at those yeterday I think so probably they're just taking off so uh we've got quite a bit of harvesting to do on this half of the greenhouse we've got the side down over there you guys can probably hear it in the wind it's quite windy this morning uh but we're going to harvest this half and then we'll show you what we get [Music] well the first half of the greenhouse is done I would say it was a great harvest we got a bunch of our yellow crook neck squash a couple zucchini that honestly we must have missed over the last couple pickings cuz suddenly they're huge we also got quite a few uh the Hungarian wax peppers here quite a few jalapenos are ready two nice siiz cucumbers and then we got about a quar of a stocked pot of green beans from one side but now we need to pick the other green beans which are on this side and there are a few tomatoes that are going to be picked today actually quite a few cherry tomatoes to pick yes that's exciting so we're going to get busy on the other side we'll show you everything once we're done [Music] oh [Music] well here you go you guys this is what we got this morning ended up with a nice little bowl of cherry tomatoes not a great start yet but hey some tomatoes are better than no tomatoes right I'll have to tell you guys though harvesting in the morning like this is my least favorite time of day to harvest because we do intermittent fasting we don't start eating until noon and when we harvest in the morning you guys know how much I love to eat while we Harvest I can't eat in the morning so I need to wait until noon to start eating all of the stuff that we picked but what that means is more of this actually gets into the house and we can use it for meals and those kinds of things so all of the green beans are making an into the house today and all of the cherry tomatoes so we are happy with today's Harvest and we are really glad that we were able to share with you the really the two things that have been helping us reclaim these tomato plants the spring bring them off with the hose and the milk who have thought that milk could be such an advantage in the greenhouse helping to control aphids right uh we we won't make the mistake we made this year again by kind of hoping that you know enough beneficials would come around naturally in the future if we start to see this issue we'll start this regimen right away we'll get them under control faster but you guys I think we have them to a point now where we still have plenty of Summer left ahead of us we can still have a great great tomato season and I'm excited for it you guys we're so happy that you joined us today here in the greenhouse if you're enjoying videos like this make sure that you hit that subscribe button and remember the best way you can help us here in the homestead is just to share our videos until next time thank you so much for stopping by our Homestead take care and God bless God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 31,280

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: x9i0N5wYSRw

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2024