I'm here to talk about one of my
favorite plants in the garden - eggplant.
Every year to get good eggplant
crops. I've got a battle flea beetles.
Today,
I'm going to show you a fairly new
product that's proven pretty successful in
this battle against flea beetles.
It's called Surround and it's
basically a white powder.
It's kaolin clay that's
been pulverized very finely.
We mix it with water,
approximately one cup of
surround to one liter of water.
We're going to spray it on our egg plants
and this will create a nice particle
barrier. Once the liquid spray dries.
Flea beetles have a difficult time finding
the plant and feeding on the leaves.
Here's a photo of an eggplant that's
not been protected with surround and you
can see a lot of flea beetle damage.
And here's an eggplant that's been sprayed
several times with surround and you
can see a nice heavy coating
of surround on the leaves.
So we're going to go right out to
the garden and show how to do this.
So we've got three Japanese eggplants in
our demonstration garden here that were
protected earlier in the
season with floating row cover.
Now we're just going to start
applying the surround and getting a,
not just like painting with
a, with a paint sprayer,
getting a nice even coding, try to
get under the leaves as best you can.
We want plenty of pressure in the sprayer.
The plants do look whitewashed and a
lot of gardeners wonder if they're not
damaging their plants,
but actually photosynthesis and growth
is not negatively affected by the
surround. So we're spraying it once today.
We'll come back in a couple of days,
spray it again and then even a third
time because we want to get a pretty good
thick coating of the surround
on the plants. If it rains hard,
we'll have to reapply it to make sure
that that barrier stays intact on the
plant.
Surround is certified organic and
completely safe to use in the garden.
When you spray it on your plants,
some will get on the fruits.
You can wash that off very easily
with water and it is safe to consume.
Safe for your family.
