Organic Cure for Aphids

Live Holistically is a multi-author site.
This post was written by: Carol Webb

I fed my worms today, I do this regularly once a month, and in the meantime they work away in the dark dank wormery creating the Rolls Royce of composts, their pooh.

They don’t ask for much. My worms love to burrow in used tea bags, other than that damp cardboard is their bedding of choice. I keep them in a wooden container outside the back door, an oblong outer box with two inner drawers, I stuff raw sheep’s wool around them in the winter so that they don’t freeze, and treat them occasionally with ground up egg shells. My garden blooms wonderfully in the summer, and trees grow in containers when they really shouldn’t flourish. My Bay tree was covered in blossom this year, when the books say that they never bloom in containers.

These are my credentials for organic gardening: I never use any kind of chemical, ever, anywhere. I want to eat my herbs straight from the garden, and I couldn’t do this if I used any kind of chemical spray. This means that spraying against aphids is out of the question.

I like to grow a lot of Nasturtiums, some for their colour and some to eat, and last year the black-fly attacked them mercilessly. Now it is considered wrong to fertilize Nasturtiums, they are supposed to make too much green and not enough flower, and so previously I have just watered them and left them to grow. This is another instance of not believing all the information in gardening books.

This year, wanting to take another route to healthy Nasturtiums, I mixed worm compost in with their ordinary compost, and when I spotted a few black-fly under a leaf, I sprayed them with neat compost mixed with rain water. The black-fly disappeared.

I don’t believe that this worked as an ordinary insecticide would. I believe that the worm compost fed the plants so well that it built up their immune system and the aphids just didn’t attack. A parasite will always attack a weak organism, it is a biological fact. Strengthen the organism and the parasite moves on to find a weaker prospect.

I have had marginally fewer flowers, but the leaves have been more peppery, which makes them ideal for chopping and putting into salads, I believe that the trade off has been worth it. And of course Nasturtium is a wonderful source of Vitamin C.

This is a downloadable article on keeping your own worms, a quick and informative read.

The basics of vermiculture.: An article from: Countryside & Small Stock Journal