Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi,
Has anyone a method of ridding the plot of white fly. This year seems to be worst than ever both greenhouse and outdoors. Next year I am going to use biological control in the greenhouse but am stumped for outdoors. Blasting them off with a hose seems a waste of water and all I will be doing is moving them on round the garden. Unfortunately there is plenty for them to over winter on (brussels etc). Any tips would be gratefully received.
Thanks
Hilary

Hello Hilary
The whitefly are probably pretty well entrenched in your sprouts by now so I think you'll have to bring up the big guns and blast them with some chemicals. I use stuff which contains 'bifenthrin' and have found it very effective - you may need a second treatment after a week or so. This stuff will clear out any lingering caterpillars and aphids as well. You'll need to do the spraying soon as a cold spell will send the pests deeper into the folds of the plant and they'll be much harder to hit.
You may be reluctant to use chemicals but at this stage I don't think that you've got much choice if you want clean sprouts.

John

PS Add a few drops of washing-up liquid to the spray as a wetting agent otherwise everything tends to just run off brassica leaves.

As I said on a previous post, my brassicas haven`t had ANY whitefly this year! They`re the bane of my life usually. Scary innit?
There haven`t been any dandelions on our end of the allotments site either. Usually there`s a veritable sea of yellow that regenerates as fast as we can weed them out!
(Cue spooky music----)

I've not tried this myself but I read recently that whitefly hate lettuce and there are people who brew lettuce tea to spray against them and claim it works quite well. I've also noticed that those who grow brassicas by the seaside don't seem to suffer much from whitefly.. could it be the salt air?
Don't bother with the brilliant notion of hanging yellow sticky traps among your sprouts.. I tried that once and they proved so attractive they doubled the number of whitefly that visited the patch.

You could try JB's patent nicotine spray; just don't brew it indoors (ask Seedling ). The details of the brew are on here somewhere, I'll try and find it later as I'm just off to work.

Hi everyone,
Think I will have to spray on this one - so will try everything unfortunately noticed a few of the little devils are also on the lettuce so not sure if that brew will work.
Also a frost this morning so they will be in deep.
Thanks for all tips.
Hilary