Winter, 54896 Wisconsin
Phone 715-266-4963
mail@wintergreenhouse.com
www.wintergreenhouse.com

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Celebrating 25 Years Growing With...

Sale lasts until Sunday, July 12th.
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Please see our tips and a slideshow!

First, Happy 4th from all of us! Hope you had a great weekend and saw some awesome fireworks. Second, please note that our hours have changed to 8:30 to 5:00 p.m., 7 days a week.

What's Bugging You?

When the weather gets hot and plants get stressed, several pests start showing up. Here are a couple of suggestions to some common problems.

• Ant Hills - 2 methods that have a high success ratio are drenching the mound with Sevin insecticide (use a gallon or so - don't disturb the hill beforehand) and mixing sugar and boric acid and sprinkling it all around the hill. (If the workers take some down to the queen, its all over.)
• 4-lined plant bugs - very tough customers. You will see little brown circular spots on the plants where they rasp the surface without actually making a hole. The trick is to get them early. Adults can migrate into susceptible crops and plants anywhere from early June through July. For plant bugs on ornamentals, we have used carbryl (Sevin) or malathion effectively. For any edible crop, check the product label first - plant bugs must be listed for the crop you want to treat. Insecticidal soap can be used as well - it just requires more patience and more sprays.
• Aphids - You often miss seeing them until you see a lot of the dead skins lying around - or a sticky sooty substance they emit called honeydew. Another sign that you may have aphids is if you see ants on your plants - they corral them like cattle and milk the honeydew periodically! Aphids reproduce at impressive rates, but they don't move so fast, so insecticidal soap or horticultural oil are good safe alternatives for control. When the situation is extreme, one great product is Bayer 3-in-1 - it contains imidacloprid which is a systemic insecticide that will eliminate the aphids for 30 days. It also has two other ingredients - one for spidermites and another for fungi.
• Spidermites - are harder to see than aphids, but can do just as much or more damage if left to their own means. The mites are almost exclusively on the underside of the plants leaves, but we usually notice some speckling or little white dots on the tops of leaves first. The mites suck the juice of the leaf from below creating the spots. Again soap and oil work well on mites, but you have to repeat the treatment every 3 days for a few times to get all stages of the life cycle. We prefer horticultural oil because it will also smother the eggs, and we have also found that mites (and aphids for that matter) have become resistant to soap treatments (believe it or not!) The downside to hort oil is that it can damage some plants - especially if the weather is cloudy and damp. The quicker the oil dries the less toxic it is to the plant. Finally the Bayer 3-in-1 chemical will control mites also, but not quite as long as the aphids.
• Mildew - if you see a white powdery substance on top or underneath the leaves of your plant, it is usually powdery mildew. Some plants (including some roses) attract it more than others. Consider finding plants that are resistant to mildew! Otherwise spray preventatively every week to ten days with a fungicide labeled for powdery mildew. We have found Fertilome Lawn and Garden fungicide to work well. Fertilome Triple Action Plus is a good natural alternative.

Keep those thumbs green!

From all of us at
Winter Greenhouse