[IGSROBIN] mealies again...
- To: I*@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
- Subject: [IGSROBIN] mealies again...
- From: I* <a*@ALGONET.SE>
- Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 16:42:33 +0200
Hello Adam,
Know what you mean...I don't 'think' I have rust...to me 'rust' is iron
oxide...mostly anyway.
Be warned..here speaks a compost freak...I happen to be very fond of my
compost bin. She is green and christened Green Johanna by the company which
manufactures her. I am not afraid of putting 'diseased' stuff into her as
she is a 'warm compost'....where the breakdown occurs more rapidly.
Naturally..there are colder zones. We emptied most of the contents the
other day. In little more than a year we have made five 60 litre-barrels
worth of 'homemade' compost! Needless to say, they went on our raised beds.
The veggies will be yummy this year!
The 'cold' compost or garden compost is much much slower. Johanna even has
her own overcoat in Winter so the compost won't freeze!
Laboratory spirits is indeed methylalcohol. It has a high
concentration...the reason I used that expression was to distuinguish it
from the 'other' stuff if you know what I mean. It is even Friday today
hehe.
A friend of mine uses something totally different for mealybugs. He is
friendly witht the local vet and has a quantity of scale shampoo used to
treat live stock ( cattle) for scale. This works too...at least in this
part of the world. I am not sure if scale shampoo is any different..the
principle ought to be the same. Best thing about it...it doesn't smell.
Another good remedy against mealies, but not the subterranean kind als, is
the spray sold to enhance the shine on the leaves of the Benjamin ficus.
As to rust...despite my comments :-))) isn't rust some kind of fungus
really? Here we can buy different kind of spores. The principle is
simple...fight fungus with a fungus. If you grew roses I am sure you would
have come across it. Often we struggle with blackspot etcetera diseases,
and these spores dug into the ground in Spring will help to alleviate the
problem.
Wish you best of luck with your mealies, they are indeed a pest,
Ingrid in Sweden
PS. In case any of you wondered, Johanna came with a ready made overcoat, I
didn't make it!!!
