so here at Daley's Nursery we're
interested in producing food plants
these are plants that produce what
you're going to eat and we want to
reduce the chemicals that we use on our
plants so in order to do that we need to
look at alternative ways of controlling
pests and diseases a more organic approach
an approach that integrates things into
our environment so in doing so we
actually incorporate some of the pests
into our growing procedures and
processes our farming practices so what
we're going to talk about today is the
good the bad and the ugly so these are
the good bugs and the bad bugs and here
at Daley's we have warm humid polyhouses this is where we grow things and
they're really great environments for
things like two spotted mites and two
spotted mite is a common plant pest so
if you have a look at this plant here
this is a berry it's called a Keriberry and you can see there are some
yellow leaves and then some dark green
leaves which is the new growth now these
older leaves were infested with two
spotted mites and what we did was we
released some predatory mites into this
area of the polyhouse and these have
actually controlled this problem on the
plant
they've just predated them they're fed
on them we need the two spotted mites to
feed the predatory mites and we get a
balance of the two
so what we actually get is a healthy
plant and we have a healthy environment
that includes lots of different insects
in our environment we also have birds
and reptiles and different animals that
visit and live in our polyhouses some
of the reptiles will control slugs the
birds will eat insects so they're really
important part of our environment and
they actually make our working
environment a better place because we
live beside all the things that are part
of our environment and we want to live
beside the insects so if you have
insects on your plants the first thing
you need to do is to be able to identify them
and in order to do that you actually
need a magnifying glass so I have here
these pretty cool glasses
these are magnifying glasses and you can
identify pests with these they have a
little light
and they look super funky
and I've got here some leaves of the
Curry bush so in order to see what's
infecting these leaves I need to be able
to magnify it
and what I can see using those glasses
is that the pests that have infected
these leaves are no longer there so this
is old damage it's not current damage
and if you look at these plants these
are the curry plants so these also had
an infestation of two spotted mites when
we released the predatory mites they
took control of this infestation so the
Predators had plenty of food they
feasted on these mites they brought the
problem back into balance and you can
see now we have this beautiful new
growth on our plant so what we want to
try and help you to understand is that a
bit of damage on your plants a few eaten
leaves a little bit of discoloration is
not a problem it's actually a part of
our environment and if we want to live
in a rich world with lots of insects and
bugs we need to reduce our chemical use
we need to stop using blanket
insecticides to control pests and we
need to look at alternatives so today
we're going to look at what someone
like bugs for bugs a company
that sells organic pest control live
insects to control your bugs can offer
you in your backyard and what we're
doing here at Daley's Nursery to
control our insect pests
