nomoss Posted May 4, 2019 Share Posted May 4, 2019 Is anyone else seeing a lot of these this year?I have never noticed them before, but all our rosemary bushes have large numbers of them, maybe six or eight to a branch. Some branches are almost completely stripped of leaves, despite French Wikipedia saying "Elles ne portent pas préjudice à ces plantes étant depuis plusieurs millions d'années en équilibre avec ces plantes."The RHS recommends shaking them off onto paper and disposing of them, but obviously they haven't seen the tangled jungle which we call a garden.So I am spraying them carefully with an insecticide which I hope will not harm bees and other benign insects which are not about in this cold weather.This part of France seems to be particularly well endowed with insect pests. We lost all our olive crop for the last 4 years to the olive fruit fly, our box bushes were devoured by box moth caterpillars, the rose buds are covered in greenfly, the oleanders with yellow aphids, and now beetles are gobbling up our rosemary[:(]We also have regular appearances of colonies of woolly aphids, black fly, and something which eats albizia leaves. Our eucalypt and loquat were so diseased they had to be cut down, and I had three or four pines removed because of infestation by processionary caterpillars. Our long grass is full of autats (jiggers), which I discovered after strimming it while stripped to the waist.Maybe I could open our garden to the public as an invasive insect reserve. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richard51 Posted May 4, 2019 Share Posted May 4, 2019 Perhaps you should go "au naturel" and see what happens for a year or two.Lots of our experiments in the Dordogneshire climate have gone wrong - including olives lovingly cared for by ourselves. Horses for courses springs to mind.The insects aren't perhaps being attracted by location/neighbours by any chance? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nomoss Posted May 4, 2019 Author Share Posted May 4, 2019 [quote user="richard51"]Perhaps you should go "au naturel" and see what happens for a year or two.Lots of our experiments in the Dordogneshire climate have gone wrong - including olives lovingly cared for by ourselves. Horses for courses springs to mind.The insects aren't perhaps being attracted by location/neighbours by any chance?[/quote]Our "garden" has been "au naturel" ever since we took it over in 2010, hence its resemblance to a jungle. Insecticides are only used as a last resort.Our nearest neighbouring land is an olive grove, which is sprayed throughout the year with godnowzwot, and the olives harvested green, before the dreaded fruit fly has completely ruined them. I guess consumers don't mind eating grubs if they are small[+o(] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
woolybanana Posted May 4, 2019 Share Posted May 4, 2019 Richard is suggesting starting an insect farm feeding off whatever you have that is green and tender. That will get you nowhere.A much better idea is to talk to the locals and see what works for them, what grows best, what they use to control insects including old recipes such as mixing crops and flowers where the latter chase insects from the former, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
suein56 Posted May 4, 2019 Share Posted May 4, 2019 nomoss wrote : Rosemary beetle (Chrysolina americana) Is anyone else seeing a lot of these this year?No, not that particular one .. but we do have this beautiful close relative :https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysolina_herbacea.. though Wiki doesn't mention France as being one of its favourite places.Edit : Sorry the software on here doesn't let me make live links. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nomoss Posted May 5, 2019 Author Share Posted May 5, 2019 [quote user="suein56"]nomoss wrote : Rosemary beetle (Chrysolina americana) Is anyone else seeing a lot of these this year?No, not that particular one .. but we do have this beautiful close relative :https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysolina_herbacea.. though Wiki doesn't mention France as being one of its favourite places.Edit : Sorry the software on here doesn't let me make live links.[/quote]That's definitely one of his relations. Does he eat everything he lands on too?Almost as bad for the environment as humans [:(] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NormanH Posted May 5, 2019 Share Posted May 5, 2019 For those who don't know the area, here is a picture of nomoss's garden:[URL=https://beta.photobucket.com/u/bfb_album/p/927ff280-aa3d-46e7-ae78-ca70ace31027][IMG]https://beta-static.photobucket.com/images/hh80/bfb_album/0/927ff280-aa3d-46e7-ae78-ca70ace31027-original.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds[/IMG][/URL] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nomoss Posted May 5, 2019 Author Share Posted May 5, 2019 This really is part of our garden, taken late February.The grass in the driveway and borders is now knee height. We can't cope with it any more, 800 square metres is too much.[url=https://postimg.cc/WD68r6BJ][img]https://i.postimg.cc/WD68r6BJ/IMG-1981-Drive.jpg[/img][/url] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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