Vegetables Gardening - Growing Organic Vegetables

DE is amazing and safe and wonderful stuff...keeping in mind of course that it does to the "good" bugs exactly what it does to the undesireable ones...so, while it will kill slugs, for example, it also does in earthworms. Used judiciously, however, it is one of the best tools around. And yes!!!to the caution about being sure it is "food grade"...the swimming pool filter DE is processed in a manner that renders it quite toxic to most life forms.

----- Original Message -----
From: Brenda Tedders
To: MittleiderMethodGardening@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, August 28, 2010 9:35 AM
Subject: [MittleiderMethodGardening] LIME GREEN CATERPILLAR

The following link will take you to the Attra Pest Managment site and I typed in Linked to Catepillar and it gives you the names of the organic insecticides. One of these is DIATAMACEOUS EARTH. It has to be food grade, which is safe for animal and human consumption and has about 14 different minerals in it. My is Red Lake Earth and has Calcium Bentonite clay in it. I use it on the ground and I dusted my Tomato plants with it to try to control White Flys, lots of them. The problem with hand dusting, you can't cover both top and bottom of the leafs and plants, so you need to purchase a professional dusting machine, either hand held or one with a shoulder strap. Go to Johnny's Seeds or I found another website at www.wolcreekranch.com which talks about Diatamaceous earth and they also have dusters and sell the earth, but more expensive than your feed store. wouldn't hurt to try theirs. I believe they say it is more white than some earths
that are sold. I can't tell yet, but the earth may be having an effect on the foilage or it is just other disease going on. I have not been able to buy any more fertilizers yet since I applied lime and 6 24 24 to my soil several months ago.

I also discovered this spring that their is an infestation of Caterpillar moths in this area, so I hope the Diatamaceous Earth will help keep them out of my plants. when the insects ingest the earth, it will dehydrate them and they will die. Also check into other organic methods too.

http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/biorationals/search_results.php?pestType=&pestName=Caterpillar&actingredients=&tradeName=&Submit+Search=Submit+Search

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