On the homefront:
Here at the Tiny Tienda, home of "Wholesome Home and Garden", there has been a lot of activity to "SAVE THE TREES!" Quite literally, this area of Baja Sur as had massive infestations of damaging insects: white flies, spider mites, Cycad white scale, thripe, fungus and more.
It has been an unusually cool spring with humid evenings and mornings, and more fog than in my previous years here. My endemic trees, palo zorrillo, palo escopeta, palo d'arco, seem to be the first notable victims. Lots of yellow leaves, yellow spots, and rust on the edge of leaves, spider webs on the flowering, fruiting ends of the mangos and plumbago.
I asked Cathy Ann Hill, our local Gardening Guru with 35 years experience in Intregrated Pest Management, to come to my place and educate me as to what I was seeing. She was a tremendous help. I knew it was serious when my sego palm died and two old, big, beautiful hibiscus had to be taken out before they spread the insects. With Cathy's help I started on a treatment plan of spraying with organic insecticides. Cathy makes and sells some of these sprays. I also used very rich neem oil, cinnamon oil, and products with pyrethrum and spinosad. Even though they are organic, in the morning when I go out to spray, I cover myself amply because they are concentrated and sting my skin on contact.
I've cut out invested branches of the palo d'arco, leaving my wood lot circle of them spare and no longer providing privacy from the neighbors. But they grow back quickly with their coppicing habit.
Not big on killing sentient beings, I am simultaneously spraying with a kelp foliar feed product to beef up the plants' immune system. They love and respond so quickly to the minerals in the ocean vegetables. They know I love them... important in our close relationship. Hopefully my grand Monkey Pod tree will pull through this as the days and nights warm up.
