Over the last couple of summers we have had our fair share of insects. It became so bad at one stage, I went online to see if I could find anyone who had a good solution.  That’s when I came across this solution on YouTube. I did a bit of a comparison to see if really could outperform traditional fly paper.

The YouTube solution is basically to place a dish of one part water, one part light coloured vinegar and a dash of detergent out to catch flies. I’m unclear on the science behind it, though I read somewhere that it is something to do with breaking the surface tension of the liquid. Another site suggested that the flies are attracted by the scent of the vinegar. In my case, I used tap water, some white wine vinegar (posh I know, but all we had) and some generic washing up liquid.

For fly paper I have some “fly stickers”, about the same surface area as the dishes, which are cleverly designed to look like a flower.

I put one sticker beside a vinegar dish outside and did the same at the same spot inside. Catching flies outside is a bit futile but I thought it would make for a good comparison. After two weeks here are the results (for insects greater in length than about 1 mm):

As you can see, inside (where the real problem is ) there is no difference between the two methods, with the sticker performing marginally better.

What was surprising to me was that in the dish outside with only 12 flies, there were also hundreds (literally) of insects about 1mm or smaller. These were largely absent from the inside dish. There was also a much more diverse selection of insects in the outside dish: (outside top, inside bottom)

I guess this is a tribute to the insect biodiversity out on the balcony! I was once under the impression that container gardening leaves you less likely to experience insects but this summer we have noticed bees, wasps, flea beetles, earwigs, centipedes, caterpillars, mites and many types of fly on the balcony to name a few.

As regards the experiment, I don’t think that there is any real difference between the two methods, but they both seem to do a reasonable job. I would say whichever is most convenient or cheapest is probably the best. I would also like to add that our fly problem is not as bad as it was last year so it might be worth investigating again when we have a really bad infestation. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

There are three other common methods I didn’t consider that are worth a mention:

Honey: A lot of people on the Internet use honey to catch flies. I guess this would have a similar effect to the sticker, although perhaps the flies would be attracted by the sugary substance.

Venus Fly Trap: While entertaining, fly traps don’t have a very high insect turnover. I had one for a number of years, which is now sadly in carnivorous plant heaven, and even in its heyday it would struggle to consume more than about one insect a month.

A Dish of Water: This probably won’t catch any insects, but I just wanted to preempt anyone who came on and commented that I should have used a proper control!

After careful humming and hawing over insecticides, we decided to take the nobler course of action and bathe the insects off our plants. Here they are queueing for the bathroom:

A few days ago I noticed that some of the indoor plants (chili, basil and oregano) had discolouration on the leaves:

After putting this out to the crowds on Twitter, I got a number of helpful replies. In particular, allotments.ie pointed me towards an article on their site about the red spider mite. These sub-millimetre creatures seemed similar to ones on the underside of the leaves of my plants when I checked, though admittedly between mediocre eyesight and shaky hands it’s hard to see anything on that scale.

There seemed to be three options:

1. Unleash a predator, namely phytoseiulus persimilis.
2. Do a regular plant wash using an oil, fatty acid or simply water.
3. Use an insecticide. Things containing bifenthrin seem to be popular.

Option 1, while exciting and fun, seemed sadly logistically troublesome. I really felt like option 3 when I found out about the infestation, but since I have calmed down, maybe I’ll keep it as a last resort. This leaves option 2:

The Shibazguyz also backed up option 2, recommending that I could wash off the guests using “a strong tap or shower”. How permanent a solution this is remains to be seen. Early checks suggest that I may not have got them all, though it’s hard to tell when they are still wet. The basil plants seemed to be the worst infested so we decided to bin them altogether.

And so that’s how I ended up spending the evening giving my plants a shower in the bath. Ridiculous carry on altogether, but sure at least I can say I tried.

“Harvest” sounds a tad dramatic for what we did this week considering the number of peas we actually accumulated but here goes…

At the start of the season I set out to do some investigation into how efficient various plants can be grown in tight spaces, often with limited light and heat. We have seen good growth and pollinated the plants successfully, but if it were a plant competition, I would have to admit that it’s not looking good for team pea.

I can confirm that, just over three months since we built our pea trellis, we have amassed a grand total of 64 peas. hat’s right, not 64 pea pods, 64 actual peas. Technically that’s 50 grams, 20 grams of which is the inedible pod/shell.  There looks to be  some new growth at the moment so I’m not ruling out the possibility of plundering the pea fields a second time, hopefully to make triple digits and a nice omelette.

Not to be set back we used some of our chilis and cabbage to make a semi-locavore stir fry as you can see in the pictures below.

Peas plus shells – no matter how pretty you make it look, it doesn’t quite make up for quantity:

A close-up so you can see each of the 64 individuals peas:

Our cabbage which has actually grown quite well. It’s a shame we only have one plant:

.. and the final product. It was very nice. Good to see a nice bit of heat from the new chilies too!

They were good fun to grow though, quantity aside. Even then, I think I’ll have a hard time justifying their square metre in my plans for next season!