Black Currant Pests

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Vitamin champion. Part 3

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The most common pests of black currant

A kidney mite, the female of which invades the kidneys. This causes them to swell. These round, thick, large buds are clearly visible on bare branches in the fall after the fall of the foliage and in the spring before it opens. So collect them from the branches and be sure to burn them. This is the simplest and most effective method. If there are a lot of buds on a branch, then it should be cut out entirely and burned.

If most of the bush is infected, then it must be cut off all at the root and also burned. A new bush that has grown from replacement shoots in this place usually does not have a bud mite. If you miss the moment when the buds on the currants open, then vagrants will come out of them, which will move into new buds. It should be said that one kidney can contain up to 5-10 thousand tick larvae!

You can cover each bush with a film, tying it around the base of the bushes, and set fire to a sulfur stick inside. You can spray the bush with one of the chemical absorbable anti-mite preparations: Appolo, Neoron, Danitol, Mavrik, which, of course, is highly undesirable in a small area of six acres. You can use one of the biological products: Fitoverm or Agravertin. And, of course, external leaf wetting preparations against gnawing insects do not act on ticks at all: Intavir, Kinmiks, Karate, Decis, Sumi-alpha, Fury and even stronger ones: Sherpa, Tsimbush, and so on. So do not poison the world around you and yourself. It will all be completely in vain.

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Of the other pests, the blackcurrant sawfly attacks the currant most often. The pest appears at the time of the formation of large ovaries and lays eggs on them. The larvae develop inside the growing ovaries, eating away the seeds in them. The berries ripen prematurely, they are clearly visible at this moment. We must collect and destroy them.

If this is not done, then the caterpillar will gnaw through the peel, come out, go down on the cobweb to the soil and go into it for the winter. Since the larva develops at the moment when there are already green berries, no pesticides can be used, but Fitoverm or Agravertin can be used if you have no time to pick prematurely ripe large ribbed berries.

Another common pest is the gooseberry moth. Pupae of the moth winter in the upper layer of soil directly under the bushes of black currants or gooseberries. Before flowering, butterflies emerge from them, which come to the surface and lay eggs on flowers. The larvae bite into the ovary and eat them, then move on to the next berries. Each of them can damage up to 6-8 gooseberries or up to 10-15 black currants.

These berries, entwined with cobwebs, are clearly visible, the main thing is to collect them on time. If in the previous summer significant damage was caused by the fire, then in the spring, just before flowering, the bushes can be treated with karbofos. Or cover the soil under the bushes with newspapers, film, so as not to allow the butterflies to come to the surface, but immediately after the beginning of flowering, the shelter should be removed to release beneficial insects. You can use biologics Fitoverm or Agravertin.

There is another old-fashioned way. In late autumn, it is necessary to spud or mulch the bushes with peat to a height of 8-10 cm, and in the spring, immediately after flowering, uncook them.

There is another fairly common common pest in gooseberries and black currants - the gooseberry moth. An elegant white daytime butterfly with a scattering of black and yellow specks on its wings. It appears in June-July, lays eggs on the underside of the leaves. The hatching caterpillars eat leaves, mainly on gooseberries, but they do not hesitate to leave black and red currants. Caterpillars are grayish with a yellow abdomen and characteristic black quadrangular spots on the back.

They pupate in the middle of summer in spider cocoons that hang on bushes. The simplest thing is to remove the cocoons and destroy. A good method of dealing with moths is spraying the garden with urea in the fall. Of course, you can prophylactically spray the currants and gooseberries with Fitoverm, as soon as a noticeable butterfly flashed or you found its caterpillars.

A very dangerous pest of black currant is glass, the nursery of which is the common bird cherry. Therefore, you cannot keep it on the site or near it. However, you can grow on the site hybrid bird cherry, virgin and red Chinese. The massive summer of this inconspicuous small butterfly goes during the raspberry blossom. At this point, protective measures should be taken.

To do this, it is enough to spray the black currant bushes with any decoction or infusion with a strong smell. For example, pine needles, tansy, onion husks, wormwood, stepchildren of tomatoes. You can spread stepchildren of tomatoes among blackcurrant bushes or put coniferous branches. (They can be stored until this time in the shade on the north side of the house after you have removed them from roses, clematis and other covering crops.) A foreign smell, mixing with the familiar smell of the host plant, the breadwinner, disorients the glass, and it flies by your bushes.

The pest also loves his offspring and does not want to doom him to death by starvation, laying eggs on a plant with a dubious smell. What if it is not suitable for his beloved children? Therefore, it is better to look for a reliable breadwinner for the offspring. Females lay up to 60 eggs each - usually near cracks or lesions in the bark of branches. The hatching caterpillar gnaws at the wood and then eats out the core of the branch, gradually descending to the very bottom.

During the first winter, it usually hibernates inside the branch. In the spring, a damaged branch is immediately visible, since the flowers or berries on it dry out, and then it begins to wither and dry up on its own. If you begin to gradually cut off such a branch with a pruner, then a black core is visible. You must gradually cut the branch until you reach clean wood, which the caterpillar has not yet reached. Somewhere among the cut pieces, she is. All pieces of branches must be burned, if desired, the caterpillar can be found inside the cut stems. It is quite large, about 2-2.5 cm, white with a beige head.

If you cut the stem to the ground, and all the time there was only a black core in it, then the caterpillar has already left the stem and came out to pupate. Spraying with Fitoverm after flowering black currants is excellent against this pest. So, if you notice drying out flowers or berries and find a black core on the cut of the stem, then just spray the bush and especially the drying branch with Fitoverm.

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Gall midge is a small mosquito, the adult larvae of which hibernate right under the bush in the soil. The flower gall midge emerges during the budding period. Leafy - at the beginning of flowering, and shoot - during the massive flowering of black currants. All types of gall midges, with strong colonization, greatly oppress the bush, cause the growth and development of shoots to stop, and then the branches dry out. Flowers usually turn reddish and fall off without giving ovaries. Before flowering, the bushes can be sprayed with Karbofos, and during the growing season, use Fitoferm.

Shoot aphids can also attack currants. Strong chemical poisons should not be used against aphids. Aphids are a sucking insect, so absorbable preparations should be used against them. Fitoverm is best suited for this. But you can get by with simple means.

Since aphids have very delicate integuments, it is enough to burn them to destroy them. You can use an infusion of needles for this purpose or take 3 tablespoons without a top of urea, add potassium permanganate until bright pink and spray, or even better, just rinse all the ends of the branches, since aphids always suck the juices from the youngest leaves and shoots, and they are at the ends.

Aphids cannot be destroyed in one go. A flying female will fly from somewhere and immediately lay hundreds of eggs, of which adults will grow up in a week and also lay hundreds of eggs, so aphids must be fought weekly, except when Fitoverm is used. This drug is absorbed and keeps the defense against all sucking and gnawing pests for about three weeks.

Aphids have natural pests: predatory gall midges, as well as ladybugs and their larvae. As soon as there are too many aphids, ladybug larvae appear. Often, gardeners mistake them for pests and destroy them. Larvae are about 7-8 mm long, black or dark gray with orange dots on the sides. They, like the ladybugs themselves, eat aphids and her eggs. These are our greatest assistants. If the bushes are sprayed with Fitoverm, then the pests that have tasted leaves or juice stop feeding within two hours after spraying, since Fitoverm causes paralysis of the gastrointestinal tract in them, and after two days they die of hunger.

If ladybugs, other beneficial insects or birds eat such insects, nothing will happen to them, but if you use pesticides in the garden to fight any pests, including aphids, this will certainly lead to the mass death of our assistants. Populations of pests, especially aphids, will recover much faster than populations of beneficial insects, and even more so birds. So, trying to poison your enemies, you poison your friends!

Among the pests of black currant, there is a false shield that sucks juices from the bark. It is clearly visible on the branches in the form of convex commas of a lighter color than the bark. If you scrape it off with a knife, do not forget to put a piece of film in the form of a baby bib under the bush so that the fallen scabbards can then be collected and burned. If this is not done, they will again crawl from the soil to the ends of the branches. The scale insects have a strong shell - a chitinous cover that protects them from enemies and pesticides, but it does not save them from Fitoverm. It also does not save from spraying with a concentrated urea solution in late autumn.

Black currants are quite frost-resistant. Its crown and growth buds are able to withstand frosts down to -40 ° C degrees. Flower buds are up to -35 ° C, but the roots can withstand only 15 degrees of frost. Buds remain up to -5 ° C, and open flowers - up to -3 ° C. The most vulnerable are young ovaries, which can withstand only 2 degrees of frost. If, after a frosty winter, the wood on the cut is dark, then it has died from too low a temperature, and the branch should be cut off gradually to healthy white wood.

Read the end of the article →

Vitamin Champion:

Part 1: Planting and growing black currants

Part 2: Pruning black currants. Diseases of black currant

Part 3: Pests of black currant

Part 4: Reproduction of black currant. Black currant varieties