Once you discover a disease on your garden plant, what can you do to control it? If you examine your plants frequently, you can discover and treat problems early on before they become major infestations.
First of all, try to catch it as soon as you can. For me, gardening is my passion, so I go out every day and look at all my plants. I know that not everyone can do that, but set aside five or ten minutes once a week. Get up early, go out there with your coffee and just walk around and look at all your plants. You have to develop a mental picture of what everything looks like normally so that if something looks different, then that would be an indication that there's a problem. So hopefully you can catch a problem before it becomes a major infestation. Most insects work the same way. There may be one or two bugs on one or two plants, and that's not a big deal. It's when two bugs get together and lay 10,000 eggs and you've got 10,000 bugs on a plant. And then some of those get together and it becomes an exponential population explosion. That's when you really start to have a problem.
There are a number of different organic solutions to a number of problems. It really depends on what the problem is. If you suspect a problem, the best thing to do is take the part of the plant that you think has a problem to an independent garden center and ask someone there to diagnose the problem. A lot of bigger stores that aren't independent will want to try to sell you a product that they claim "does everything." But the environmental impact of a lot of those products that "take care of everything" is very high. As the population grows, the more people that are doing that, the more we're polluting our waterways and killing off beneficial insects and other organisms. We sell a number of organic fungicides and things that kill bacteria. We have a number of different organic insecticides, and some of them are developed specifically for a certain type of bug. For example, if you have caterpillars, you can get a broad spectrum poison that kills everything or you can get a product that just kills caterpillars. Obviously that's going to be a much better way to go because you won't be killing beneficial insects.
Another thing we sell is actually beneficial insects like ladybugs, praying mantises and green lacewings. There are a number of different beneficial insects that you can release into your yard and they'll actually attack and kill the bad insects. That's another thing that's getting more popular - combating problems with nature's solutions to the problems, which is their own natural enemies.
