I live in San Diego. I have an organic backyard garden with kale, collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower, bell peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, spinach, eggplants, beets, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, onions, leeks, and a large variety of herbs.
I started noticing that by the time my cauliflower heads should have been forming nicely, i saw what appeard to be multiple heads that were very clearly stunted.
Not yet putting the pieces together, a few weeks earlier, some of my broccoli plants, while prodcuing, seemed to have severly slowed down.
Meanwhile, my very prolific ragged jack (red winter) kale plants started developing white, scorched edges, the leaves wilted, and major holes began to develop. Less so with the collards, but they had many large holes in the leaves. So, I trimmed the affected leaves back, cleared whatever debris that may have been laying on the topsoil, cleared any weeds, and started paying attention more closely.
At this time is when i saw my first bragada bug. They seemed to have infested my furthest patch of cauliflower...and encroached a bit more each day, until I found total infestation in all my cole crops. In fact, one morning i discovered that they had consumed two entire cauliflower plants. It was as if someone came back there and pulled the plants from the ground in the middle of the night. That was my call to action.
I have a very prolific garden and finally got the point where 80 percent of the veggies I ate came from my back yard, so, naturally I didn't want to lose my crops.
I started reading online to see what others were doing but honestly I didn't feel encouraged with the methods suggested.
At first I tried scattering a few sluggo plus pellets to see if that would help. It did not. Then I tried spraying organocide (fish oil, sesame oil, and lethicin). That didn't help (although it drove the cats crazy for a few days...they just knew some food was laying around in that garden somewhere). In fact, it seemed to exacerbate the problem.
I did read about diatomaceous earth and soap treatment, both of which i had on hand. I caught a few of the bugs and threw them in a jar that was dusted with diatomaceous earth. I could tell that after an hour or so that it seemed to slow them down. The problem with DE, however is that it sinks into the soil upon watering.
I tested the soapy water spray as well, and that, much to my surprise, seemed to work almost instantly.
So, I filled up my spray container with soapy water and began spraying all the leaves. After that, i sprinkled a light coating of diatomaceous earth directly on the leaves and under the plants.
The next day, I saw not a single bragada bug...not one. I was elated. As a precautionary measure, I left the DE on the leaves for 48 hours, then rinsed them off. I doused each bed with about two gallons of soapy water just in case any were hiding out in the soil and again sprinkled the beds lightly with DE.
I haven't seen a single bragada at all and I'm very pleased. What I thought was going to be total decimation by bragada, instead turned into a total organic eradication - by soap - within 24 hours.
I thought I'd share my results.
Happy gardening!
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