I have been writing a series of blogs about my experiences in growing an organic container garden. You can see the most recent post here.
So I encountered yet another pesky pest: leaf miners. I had first noticed little white marks on some of the leaves, after spraying them with a natural garlic pesticide. I just assumed it caused s couple of the leaves to get these little white marks. I was wringing. It started happening on a bunch of the leaves even when I did not spray them with anything. I did some research and discovered it was leaf miner.
Here it is on tomato leaves:
On Basil leaves:
So I had to go through and cut off all the leaves that had it and then spray the remaining leaves with neem oil. According to Wikipedia; a leaf miner is the larva of an insect that lives in and eats the leaf tissue of plants. The vast majority of leaf-mining insects are moths sawflies and flies. It’s really easy to recognize, once you understand what it is and know what it looks like.
While neem oil does not immediately kill insects, it will disrupt their life cycle to the point that they do not feed, fly, or mate, resulting in the demise of the infesting population. So the neem oil will help in having fewer insects actually lay their eggs and create the larvae.
The leaf miner has to be really bad, to affect the vegetables the plants will produce, so you can just leave it alone if you like, I didn’t want to, so I removed a bunch of leaves that were affected and since then, I have noticed one or two and removed them as well. I will continue to check daily for it, to keep it under control.
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