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soil sanitizing soil

Al-from-Chile

Al-from-Chile

hi there,

I have a 5 x 1 yard patch WITHIN my house which is soil. We have some tomatoes, peppers and var. herbs there.

However, everything I plant there sooner or later gets the lice and tons of it ... this makes me think that they are probably somewhere in the soil as well (in a panic attac, I got rid of ALL plants there :D - so there is just soil now)



so, what's a good way of nuking the cr@p out everything with more than 4 legs out of this patch?

or would it suffice to put - say - 3" of compost-soil above all that - or would the aphids eventually get through that layer of soil as well?


I would be interested in hearing possible solutions from most-eco to least ecological (agent orange, gamma rays?)


thx folks

Al "sack full of lice" B.
 
What you'll want to do is to plant a single plant in the middle of the soil. Ring it with very tiny bear traps, dig very tiny pits filled with feces covered toothpick spikes, tripwires, the whole shebang.

Any aphids that make it through your ring of death, they think they're safe. They let their guard down and start sucking on those juicy leaves. Well, that's when you sneak up behind them with a very tiny garrote wire. The head is put up as a warning to the others on a very tiny pike. The bodies are to be desecrated and left to be feasted upon by the vultures.

Then you start distributing tiny leaflets. "$100 bounty for turning in your fellow aphids!" they'll read. Sure, few of them will take you up on it, but it'll plant the seeds of mistrust among the aphid alliance. Brother shall turn against brother, son against father.

That, or get some ladybugs.
 
Great advice Wulf, but I got some other option :

#1 - You put some quicklime on the ground and pour water on it. It will kill everything even worms.

#2 - You bring a orang-outan, he should eat quite a few

#3 - You hire a french guy : he will eat your lice, you snails, your peppers, and everything that is eatable. Nothing alive will remain.

No seriously, what do you mean by "lice" ? The things kids have on their heads at primary school ?
 
Wulf said:
What you'll want to do is to plant a single plant in the middle of the soil. Ring it with very tiny bear traps, dig very tiny pits filled with feces covered toothpick spikes, tripwires, the whole shebang.

Any aphids that make it through your ring of death, they think they're safe. They let their guard down and start sucking on those juicy leaves. Well, that's when you sneak up behind them with a very tiny garrote wire. The head is put up as a warning to the others on a very tiny pike. The bodies are to be desecrated and left to be feasted upon by the vultures.

Then you start distributing tiny leaflets. "$100 bounty for turning in your fellow aphids!" they'll read. Sure, few of them will take you up on it, but it'll plant the seeds of mistrust among the aphid alliance. Brother shall turn against brother, son against father.

That, or get some ladybugs.
Click to expand...

I like your thinking ... btw ... what would be the slowest and most painful way to die for a aphid? ... a neighbor *cough* *cough* asked me the other day :D



unfortunately, ladybugs are not very common here, let alone you cant buy them ...

cheers
al

PHB said:
Great advice Wulf, but I got some other option :

#1 - You put some quicklime on the ground and pour water on it. It will kill everything even worms.

#2 - You bring a orang-outan, he should eat quite a few

#3 - You hire a french guy : he will eat your lice, you snails, your peppers, and everything that is eatable. Nothing alive will remain.

No seriously, what do you mean by "lice" ? The things kids have on their heads at primary school ?
Click to expand...

great advice, ... and bonus-points for the frech reference :D

Yumyumyellow said:
quicklime, fresh wood ash, and kerosene emulsion will nuke them.
This is helpful, starts on page 94.
Click to expand...

thx, could you tell me more on the wood ash thing ... we recently burnt a lot ... so that seems do-able ...

how much would I have to put out ... wait how long? ... and then put the compost-soil over it?

thx!
al
 
(I don't know why, I was sure that Yumyumyellow was going to be in this thread ... :P )

or you can use Thermite with AI and FeO that will turn your garden to fire or make a bomb with NaClO3 & sugar that will wipe out anything alive ... :onfire:

Okay I stop there, otherwise everybody will think that the froggy belong to some crappy salfist group that plant bombs everywhere ....
 
The two most eco options I can think of are
  1. Boiling water. Will kill lots of things, including bad microbes.
  2. Diatomaceous Earth (DE). Spread on the surface, will kill many types of crawly things.
DE is made of silica which is mostly inert, and what little does break down and react is a useful nutrient for plants. Water is...water.

Alternate option is to dig out the old 6-12" down and then build up new, clean, nutrient rich soil.
 
PepperWhisperer said:
The two most eco options I can think of are
  1. Boiling water. Will kill lots of things, including bad microbes.
  2. Diatomaceous Earth (DE). Spread on the surface, will kill many types of crawly things.
DE is made of silica which is mostly inert, and what little does break down and react is a useful nutrient for plants. Water is...water.

Alternate option is to dig out the old 6-12" down and then build up new, clean, nutrient rich soil.
Click to expand...


thx, man - boiling water is out of the question ... its just too much soil volume I am handling

DE is worth a look (if I can get it locally)

thx, Al
 
solarization:
http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn74145.html
Here is how it works: You dig a trough around your garden.. Water the garden thoroughly. Then you lay clear plastic that is just thick enough to last without getting holes on the soil. Where the trenches are along the edge cover the plastic with dirt. Leave a little hole for the hose. Stick the hose in and water more. Pull the hose out and cover the hole with dirt. Essentially you have plastic with a dirt border on top of dirt. Leave for 6 of the hottest weeks you have in the summer.
 
thx for the tips and tricks ....

but not everything is workable ...

here a pic of what I am talking about

4C76F2EE-orig_zpsffc15770.jpg


literally everything I grow there is invested within days!

i have been spraying with a leem-oil solution 3 times the last week, and it does seem to improve things, but not very fast ...

I will give it 3 more days before I bring in the heavy artillery :D



again, I guess my central Q. is: will the aphids re-appear if I chop up all plantes and bury the bugs under 3" of compost-soil???
 
I don't think 3" will be enough. (...."that's what she said"...)

Looking at the pictures, the boiling water thing might actually work. Get your biggest pot full of boiling water, you could probably do one 'section' of dirt per hour. As long as you do them all within a day or two you should nuke it all before it can re-contaminate. You'd need to quarantine the current plants somewhere far away though.

Also, be heavy on the aphid treatment for a while afterwards too. All it takes is one to bust through quarantine and you're re-infested.

Random thought, if you've already got 3" of compost laying around.... Lay down a biodegradable layer of newspaper, put the compost over it, then grow the plants over that. The roots will eventually push through as the paper breaks down, but any aphid strong enough to get through is probably just gonna kill your family with its bare hands instead of worrying about the plants anyway. Wait for somebody to confirm this'll help before doing it, this just popped into my head and isn't thought through. You'd also need a complete quarantine again, the aphids already on your plants will just recontaminate everything above the paper line.
 
Is it the floor in red I see on the pic ? Because if you only manage to sanitize the soil area on the pic, bugs will come from the side anyway. So you should remove all the floor, sanitize everything, and then put the floor back.

Why not using aphid predators like ladybirds ?
 
hmmm .... the floor is a 10" concrete slab ... i dont know if I'd go to such length to remove it :shocked:

... as a matter of fact, we just put it there a couple of years


I like the idea of the ladybugs - but they are few and far between here (in general, Santiago is fairly dry in summer - so we dont get too much bugs or mosquitos ...

also, no DE down here ;-/ .... so that wont work either

currently, my first "go-to" approach will be covering everything with wet newspaper and putting the compost above this ... than I will standing like this:

dep_6607758-Fun-man-with-magnifying-glass.jpg


and fire-bread on anything with 5 or more legs :D ... if I can get them sucker early enough, it should be workable ...

cheers
al
 
One other consideration. Assuming you kill every last aphid in the place, does the room stay sealed well enough to prevent more from getting in?
 
Wulf said:
One other consideration. Assuming you kill every last aphid in the place, does the room stay sealed well enough to prevent more from getting in?
Click to expand...

no, it does not ... and dont get me wrong ... i know this is not the space shuttle either ... but I would like to have something like a "sound start" with new plants and not carry over this 6 legged syph :D

cheers and thx for all your input
 
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