Where do garden pests winter and how to ruin their life?

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In late autumn, after the end of leaf fall, but even before the onset of frost, I highly recommend taking a walk in the garden and carefully inspecting your plants. Surely you will find a lot of interesting things. And if you arm yourself with a magnifying glass or a magnifying glass, then even more so. Hateful and almost invincible aphids lay eggs directly on the bark of trees or shrubs. In the cracks of the bark of the branches and stambas of old trees, wrapped in a spider web cocoon, the caterpillars of the apple and plum moths winter. They ate 90% of your crop. To prevent this from happening again next season, I advise you to immediately declare war on garden pests.

Inspect the garden for pests

Last season, the apple trees were underdeveloped leaves, buds, flowers and ovary showered? Take a look if there are small oval orange eggs of the apple thistle in the folds of the bark. This is her “hand” business. Some pests build nests of leaves for the winter, wrapping them in cobwebs, and they are clearly visible on a bare tree. There are pests that literally bite under the bark of the plant and do egg laying there. Notice if there are prematurely dried out shoots?

And this is only the visible part of the resettlement of pests. A lot of them arrange quite a comfortable wintering for themselves, not on plants blown by the frosty winter wind, but at their base, in fallen leaves and in clods of the earth of the near-trunk circle. It’s clear that, having wintered, they will immediately attack your plants with the onset of heat. But plants, after the winter are weak, they need to grow new leaves for normal nutrition, and someone already eats them. What harvest and beauty are there for eyes and soul?

But there is spring spraying, which is designed to kill all this evil "in the bud." That's how it is. But is it not better not to give pests (and diseases, including) a chance for a comfortable wintering and preventive autumn garden treatment? Especially if your garden suffered from their invasion last season.

We clean the garden from pests manually

Before you take on the sprayer, you can get rid of a lot manually, without the use of chemicals. If, for example, you find an egg laying or nests with wintering caterpillars on a tree, it is enough to scrape them off and clean them with the back of the knife blade (not sharp).

The old, exfoliating, already dead bark must be carefully removed with a spatula or the cycles removed. Do not forget to spread a film or dense tissue in the trunk circle, and it is best to just burn all the collected dead remains and pests accumulated there. After such a “peeling”, peeled trunks can be whitened.

Whitewash Composition: water 10 liters, freshly slaked lime 2 kg and about the same amount of clay. The higher the whitewash, the better.

Read more about autumn whitewashing of trees in our material.

To disturb the comfort of pests and diseases wintering under plants, the easiest way is to remove all the fallen leaves and dig them deeper into the ground at the far end of the garden. Or put in a compost heap, but provided that the compost heap is correct and heats up to a temperature of about 60 degrees.

Naturally, the soil under the plants should be dug up (if you dig), or mulched with a thick layer (needles, rotted sawdust). In the first case, much will be on the surface and either become a victim of birds, or undergo the cleansing effect of frost. In the second case, successfully wintered pests will be difficult or impossible to get to the surface in spring. Which way to choose is up to you, I think that a combination is better: an autumn digging of a near-trunk circle or a bed with subsequent thick mulching.

Naturally, all cocoons found in the crown, as well as mummified fruits, should be removed and burned.

We carry out autumn preventive spraying of the garden from pests

But most likely, no matter how hard you try, even with only a few trees and shrubs, it is unlikely that you can manually clean your garden of all pests. It is impossible to do without the help of chemistry. Today, there are many drugs for treating the garden from pests and diseases. When choosing a drug, carefully read the instructions and pay attention to what temperatures it is recommended to use.

Say, some drugs work at temperatures above +10 degrees, and for late fall spraying this is not the most optimal temperature. After all, it should be carried out at completely fallen foliage and positive temperatures (optimally +5 degrees), spraying at negative temperatures is not recommended.

However, just at this time, the plants bark thickens and the buds completely close and become invulnerable to frost, which allows you to use strong solutions of drugs that cannot be sprayed on trees and shrubs during the growing season (on leaves). Recall the inexpensive and time-tested tools.

Urea

Carbamide (urea) has proven itself excellently. In the right concentrations, it literally burns spores of infections and eggs of insect pests laid on the bark, being, in fact, both a fungicide and an insecticide. The main thing is to choose the right concentration.

If in the past season your garden was not captured by the epidemic of any diseases or the invasion of pests, then it can conditionally be considered “clean”, and Carbamide is used in a concentration of 200-300 grams per 10 liters of water (in a glass with a volume of 200 ml - 130 g).

If there were problems in the garden - aphids, tinnitus, scab, powdery mildew, etc., then it is worth using a stronger solution: 500, or even 700 grams per 10 liters of water.

Many gardeners know that Urea is an excellent nitrogen fertilizer that promotes plant vegetation. Indeed, with early spring spraying, in addition to getting rid of pests and diseases, urea stimulates plant growth. But when spraying in late autumn, at already lowered temperatures, it will not cause any growth, so use it boldly.

Inkstone

inkstone — Another popular remedy that is suitable for late fall garden spraying. In a “clean”, non-sick garden, one concentration is made - 200-300 grams per 10 liters of water (in a 200 ml cup - 180 grams), if the garden was sick, then 500 grams per 10 liters of water.

In old gardening aids, 800 grams are also found, but perhaps this is too much. But to mix carbamide and iron sulfate for greater effect, it is quite possible, and in the same concentrations, making the so-called "tank mixture".

By the way, with the help of a 3% solution of iron sulfate, it is possible to effectively fight lichens on the trunks and branches of trees, because it is precisely in their porous structure that pathogens and insect pests often winter.

Blue vitriol

To spray the garden before winter, it is used in a concentration of 300 grams per 10 liters of water (in a 200 ml cup - 210 grams). And if lime is added to copper sulfate, then Bordeaux liquid, popular among gardeners around the world, will turn out for more than a hundred years. True, it is worth mentioning that when preparing it, you need to follow certain rules and the sequence of actions. For late fall rooting spraying, a 3% version of this fungicide can be used.

There is an interesting group of preparations containing emulsions of mineral oils (preparations 30-B and 30-D), after treatment with them a film is formed on the plant that does not allow air to pass through. As a result, the plant does not do any harm, ecology, by the way, too, but all that pathogenic and harmful that winters on the plant simply suffocates. Moreover, it is impossible to get used to such conditions by pests, and the drug can be effectively used from year to year.

You can use other, more modern preparations for treating the garden in the fall, but again, some of them have a limit on the temperature of use, be careful.

How to carry out late autumn spraying of the garden?

And also remember that all these drugs are of contact action, i.e. effective in direct contact with spores, eggs or larvae. Therefore, it is very important: during such treatments, trees and shrubs should be completely moistened, from the crown to the bottom of the trunk.

Moreover, it is worth processing the tree trunk circle. True, keep in mind that not all preparations are useful for the soil, its microflora and plant nutrition. And remember: if even a small area with wintering spores remains unaffected, then in the spring they will again fly around the garden, and the surviving larva or egg-laying will give new generations of pests.

Therefore, it is desirable to use modern gasoline or electric sprayers that can create a fine mist from drugs that penetrates into the smallest pores and cracks of the bark. In some cases, special preparations can also help - adhesives, which provide good contact between the chemical substance and the plant bark.

A special topic is stem pests (for example, sapwood). Their presence can be determined by the holes in the bark of plants. It’s difficult to deal with them. At the initial stage, the affected branches are simply cut and burned, but with a strong infection, manual collection and even spraying will not give a result. Therefore, in the fall, you can try to make stem injections, say with the drug “Actellik”, literally injecting it into the holes with a syringe.

We attract birds to the garden!

An important event to combat precisely insect pests is to attract birds to the garden. To do this, from late autumn it is worth hanging feeders (birds are fed only during frosts) and even arrange shelter from the weather. No one better than the birds will not detect and destroy the pest hidden in a secluded place. And the woodpecker and starling will get even stem pests.

Of course, birds, manual cleaning and late fall gardening will not be able to completely solve all the problems in your garden. Therefore, in the early spring, until the plants awaken, the exact same inspection and the same treatment with the same drugs should be repeated, securing success.

And do not forget about safety precautions. A respirator, rubber gloves, overalls are the necessary attributes of any chemical treatment of the garden. By the way, and the collection of some wintering caterpillars should be carried out with gloves, they are poisonous.

Have a good winter in your garden!