Greenfly Dye

[MadTom]

I'm having a bad time with greenfly at the moment and it occurred to me that if would be easier to kill the little buggers if I could see them more clearly. I'm being organic and nothing seems to work at the moment!
Does anyone know of a dye I could spray on that would highlight them?
It would be nice if you could use something like flourescine so you could then use a UV lamp to make em show up so you could squish them!
Or better still dynamite so they'd blow themselves up!

[Millymollymandy]

Ha ha I thought you wanted to make dye out of the greenfly! If you've ever seen the colour of your fingers after a good squishing session then I think it could be possible!

[MadTom]

Thats not as silly as it sounds - have you noticed that once you find a use for a weed (dandelions for salads and coffee, nettles for beer...) it spontaneously starts dying off.
If you could find a use for greenfly the same would happen there too.....

[Peggy Sue]

So True Mad Tom, I didn't know what the purple rapent flower was taking over my garden until a friend told me it was comfrey- now there's never enough of it to make comfrey tea fertilizer!

Back to the original thread for a minute.... have you tried spray ing them with Rhubarb leaf spray, not to dye them but to kill them, it works with whitefly and blackfly and is organic....and easy to resource this time of year!

[MadTom]

I've tried that and several other things but they all seem to be 'contact' required. So if you dont actually hit the little things then the next day they've pooped a whole new army out their bottoms!

[Millymollymandy]

You need to unfurl each individual leaf, first check for ladybirds before you spray with nasty things which will kill them, then squidge them off or spray with soapy water and squidge at the same time, which both kills them and washes them off (and washes the dye/gunk off your fingers at the same time!). My currants were starting to get affected but I spotted some ladybirds and now that I've inspected the curled up leaves again a week later most of the aphids have gone!

[MadTom]

Its not that easy - I've nearly 100 tomato plants and that would be a real forth bridge project for them alone. Alas I havent seen a ladybird this year - I live in a farming area so no wildlife other than foxes bred to hunt - and badgers to eat my sweetcorn!
In a world where we can put 10,000,000,000 transistors on a chip for £20 you'd think someone could make something to make greenfly stand out without killing the world....

[Millymollymandy]

What you need is blackfly.....

[oldfella]

Chop up a Chilli and some soap add heaped spoonfull of garlic, put in a bottel of warm water and steep for a week or so and spray on your plants. I dont know where I got this from but it works for me.

[MadTom]

Just checked my Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Nigrescens' - covered in the stuff....

[Millymollymandy]

I just got some of that from my mum - she has loads of it yet it sells in garden centres for about £7 or €7 a small pot! Must go and check for greenfly on it - it's not the sort of thing I would imagine being attacked by it!

Whilst on the subject of pests I have just read that spraying a mixture of half milk half water on roses is supposed to be good for mildew. One of my roses has mildew on it so I will have a go and see if anything happens!

[MadTom]

The comment re the Ophiopogon was a joke - being black and your blackfly comment and all...
Re the milk and water for mildew - used to do that an my courgettes/marrows for mildew
1pt milk to 9 parts water though and spray every couple of weeks. Any more milk and youre growing quiche!

[Millymollymandy]

Oh sorry duh!!! Being a bit of a geek with Latin plant names the joke went right over the top of my head. I even checked it for aphids yesterday - no there weren't any!

Is that recipe for full fat milk or semi though? I still haven't tried as I was out yesterday and the forecast is rain today. I had loads of mildew problems on cucumbers last year so can it be used as prevention as well as cure?

[MadTom]

Re the milk I think its best to try full fat - you could experiment with both and let us know?
I think its the natural antibodies in it that kill the fungus and it can be used as a prophylactic (schoolboy snigger still and I'm 50 for goodness sake) but if your in N Devon like I am and have a year like last year its probably a waste of milk! Last year I had tomato/potato blight in june and my polytunnel was just riddled wiht various fungi by the end of july so using the logical thinking above I tried growning mushrooms - seemed to help a bit!

[Millymollymandy]

I'll try it with semi skimmed as that's all I have and see whether it does anything to the rose that is affected. I'll probably spray the others that haven't got it yet just in case although if they don't get it I won't know whether the milk helped or not, will I?

I didn't get blight until Sept but the mildew was really noticeable; it wasn't a wet summer here but was very cloudy, cool and windy.