How to deal with thrips on cucumbers?

How often gardeners are faced with a variety of pest problems, both in open beds and in greenhouses. This reduces the yield, and contributes to the infection of other crops, and brings grief and anxiety to the owner. Therefore, it is advisable to know the main distinguishing features of popular pests of garden crops.

The name of thrips is probably known to an advanced gardener, many have seen their image in a picture in a book or on the Internet, but hardly anyone has seen these pests live on plants, since their size is very small and you can see how they look with the naked eye. hard. Thrips are very small insects with a long body and a tapered head. They are classified as fringed. They have very peculiar wings: two pairs of narrow wings are covered with a fringe of cilia. Because of this, their flight is similar to fluttering from one plant to another and does not differ in range. Thrips do not fly far. Their dimensions are 1-1.5 mm, but not more than 5 mm. Males differ from females by the presence of wings. Cucumber thrips not only harms the plant, but is also a carrier of dangerous viral diseases.

California thrips is also called Western flower thrips. In our country, he is found in certain areas, but gradually captures more and more territories for his residence. It damages both vegetable and flower crops of greenhouse cultivation. It can also affect plants near greenhouses and greenhouses. Its habitat is about three hundred plants, especially roses, chrysanthemums and cucumbers. Tobacco thrips prefers solanaceous and celery plant groups. It can be found in onions, seedlings, cabbage and, of course, cucumbers.

Since at all stages of their development - from the larva to the adult insect - thrips feed on the sap of stems, leaves, flowers, the results of their vital activity are visible even on young plants.

• On cucumbers affected by these pests, various lines, spots, dots appear on the leaves. First, separate spots of white, silver, red or yellow appear. Then the affected area expands, and the leaves completely turn yellow and fall off.
• On the buds, on the shoots, the discharge of this pest is noticeable. They are of a sugary appearance and are the cause of the sticking of the buds and their further dropping, as well as the cause of the curvature of the shoots.
• A diseased plant begins to grow poorly, loses leaves, and the cucumbers themselves are deformed and lag behind healthy plants.

Both in the greenhouse and in the open field it is very difficult to get rid of this winged pest. Thrips wait out the winter in the soil, and as soon as the air temperature rises to 8 degrees Celsius, they come to the surface. During the season in the middle lane, up to 8 generations of this pest are hatched, in the southern latitudes there are much more. And since they feed on the juice of the whole plant, piercing all parts of a flower or vegetable crop, it is advisable to fight them during the entire growing season, using all sorts of methods of struggle in a complex: chemical preparations, and biological, and folk remedies, and agricultural techniques ... This is the only way to save the plants, get rid of them at least for a season and try to destroy all generations of this pest.

The use of chemistry is perhaps the best that can be offered in the fight against this pest. But this does not give a 100% guarantee, since at a certain point in their development, thrips become invulnerable. When insects have laid eggs in the leaves and tissues of cucumber stalks, pesticides will not help in the treatment of the plant. Also, the use of the same drug will cause stable immunity to the pesticide of the next generations of pests. This means that in order to treat the crop both during one season and in subsequent years, it is necessary to change the preparations with which we will process the plant.

Therefore, when choosing, when changing an insecticide, one must look at its composition, and not at the trade name. A poison with different names may have identical active ingredients that you have already used in previous treatment and which have already caused addiction and immunity to their action. On the basis of the active substance imidacloprid, several identical preparations have been created, such as Prestige, Matador, Masterpiece. It should also be borne in mind that imidacloprid itself can be called differently. Its other names are admiral and gaucho.

You can classify drugs by the main substance.

• Imidacloprid. It is better for them to process the plant before flowering and not to use it on plants grown for fresh green mass.
• Diatoxam. It acts through the digestive tract of pests. Dangerous for bees. Contained in drugs such as "Aktara" and "Tiara".
• Cypermethrin. Do not use during flowering. It does not affect the eggs of thrips, therefore, it is advisable to treat the plants with such preparations several times. It is found in such well-known preparations as Iskra, Alatar and many others.

To combat the pest, the biological product "Metarizan" is used. It is not only an insecticide, but also a fertilizer and a stimulant for plant growth. It is based on the mycelium of the fungus, which, getting into the soil, begins to parasitize on insects, including thrips. The duration of the effect of this drug is up to 4 years and it is not dangerous either for humans, or for insects and animals living on the surface, or for earthworms, or for birds.

Treatment with folk remedies did not meet the hopes of gardeners too much, but for lovers of environmentally friendly farming, spraying with solutions with some substances diluted in them can be used against thrips.

For processing with ammonia, such a solution is prepared: 50 ml of ammonia, 100-150 grams of laundry soap shavings are added to 10 liters of water. Everything is mixed well and cucumbers are sprayed with this solution, abundantly wetting the leaves. It is advisable to repeat this treatment every two weeks - for prophylaxis and for the final elimination of thrips.

Processing should be carried out in calm weather, since ammonia vapors evaporate very quickly in the air. If you use a solution of only ammonia, then its effect can be protective, and help in fertilizing plants, saturate them with nitrogen necessary for the growth of cucumbers, and also help prevent fungal diseases.

Half a bar of soap is grated or finely chopped and poured with one and a half liters of hot water, not boiling water.300-500 ml of this solution is diluted in a liter of water and cucumbers are sprayed with this agent once a week throughout the summer. It is a very environmentally friendly protective agent.

They also use tobacco dust - a product of tobacco processing. The nicotine in the composition causes paralysis in garden pests. Flowers, cabbage, cucumbers, and their ground part are sprinkled with dry tobacco dust. Tobacco dust can be added to the soil or prepared on the basis of tinctures or decoctions. Spraying cucumbers is best done in the late afternoon, in the early stages, while there are no flowers and a few weeks (two to three) before the first cucumbers appear.

To prepare the broth, take half a glass of tobacco dust, dilute in one liter of water, boil for 30 minutes and insist for 24 hours, filter and dilute in a ratio of 1 to 2. You can add a little liquid soap to this solution. Cucumber leaves are sprayed on both sides. After 7 days, the treatment is repeated. Cucumbers are processed in this way up to three times per season. You can prepare a strong infusion based on tobacco dust and makhorka. Here the concentration of nicotine will be higher. For one part of tobacco dust, you need to take 10 parts of hot water and leave for 3 days, then strain and spray.

Also used are infusions of onion husks, marigolds, celandine, garlic, dandelion, chamomile and other garden and field plants.

• For an infusion of marigolds, dry crushed flowers are poured with warm water from a ratio of one to two parts and the solution is infused for two days, after which it must be filtered and used for spraying.
• For infusion of celandine, you can use freshly cut flowers in the amount of three hundred to four hundred grams or dried flowers in the amount of one hundred grams. The flower mass is poured with one liter of water and infused for 24 to 36 hours.
• An infusion of garlic or onions is prepared in the following proportions: add one teaspoon of finely chopped garlic or onion to one glass of water. Insist for a day, then spray or wipe the leaves. A similar solution can be prepared using onion peels.
• For an infusion of dandelions, you need to take thirty grams of finely chopped root or fifty grams of freshly picked leaves and pour one liter of warm water. The infusion will be ready in three hours.
• It will take 12 hours to prepare an infusion of chamomile flowers. Here, one hundred grams of flowers need to be poured with 1 liter of water. Then mix five grams of the resulting infusion and four grams of green soap in one liter of water and spray the plant. But you must not forget to wash off this solution from the plants in a day.

Currently, a variety of thrips traps are widely used in greenhouses. Yellow glue traps help identify the presence of a pest in the greenhouse and eliminate both small numbers and large clusters of thrips due to their large surface. A sex pheromone is placed in a pheromone trap on a glue base, which attracts males. Today, glue traps are one of the most effective methods of struggle.

As a preventive measure against this pest, the correct agricultural technology is used. Since by autumn the main accumulation of thrips is observed at the base of the plants, and with the onset of cold weather they move into the soil, the main thing that needs to be done in the fall is to remove the affected plants and burn them. It is also important to dig up the ground in autumn and spring, to remove and destroy weeds in time. It is better not to plant cucumbers immediately after the onion, there is a high probability of their infection with thrips. Correct crop rotation is the prevention of infestation.

It is worth listening to some advice from gardeners.

• Prevention and complex impact on pests by all kinds of means will help to cope with this persistent pest.
• Choose very carefully the material for planting, inspect the seedlings for pests, and it is better to process the seeds before planting.
• In order not to miss the moment of the spread of pests on the site, it is advisable to inspect the plants more often, identify the problem in time and begin to deal with it in all known ways. Thrips reproduce very quickly and produce new offspring within a week. If an infected plant is found, it is imperative to examine all the plants in the neighborhood, since thrips very quickly move from a sick plant to a healthy plant.
• Even in the old days, people knew about the need to replace plants and observed crop rotation. And now it is one of the rules of successful farming. Therefore, it is advisable not to plant cucumbers after vegetable crops that were infested with thrips in the past year, or crops that also have a high probability of infection.
• In greenhouses, it is necessary to more often arrange for plants not only abundant watering, but also a shower, and make sure that the air is not too dry.

For information on how to deal with thrips on cucumbers, see the next video.