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Originally Posted by b54red
I went out and checked my all my remaining plants which is over 60 still in the garden and found that even the ones I wasn't sure were infected are. There are no varieties that are not showing the effects of the disease but some are showing far less extreme signs of it than others. There are probably around 25 or more different varieties out in the garden now. Since they all have it I am just going to leave the ones with tomatoes and see if I can get some more decent eating fruits off them before the real cold weather gets here. I have noticed that a lot of the fruit I have eaten lately does have that kind of uneven ripening and sometimes that kinda solid type center that Marsha mentioned but they still taste way better than the ones in the store.
The whiteflies are definitely thinning out and the only thing it could be is the extreme windy and cooler weather since I gave up spraying them a week ago because it was just so hopeless. It is so windy that the carrots, mustard and turnips I planted late yesterday afternoon and watered thoroughly just before dark were in need of water again by eight this morning. If this wind keeps blowing like this I will have to water several times a day to get a good stand. I have learned that keeping the soil surface moist makes a big difference in germination of small seeds.
The wind is so bad that all the leaf footed bugs were clustered this morning in bunches to stay out of the wind so I blasted three different clusters all at different stages of development from young juveniles to full grown adults. Wow that was an easy way to kill a lot of pests and use just a few sprays from a hand spray bottle with Permethrin and Dawn. I will keep checking the different plants for more leaf footed bugs and stink bugs the next few days because the fewer here when winter comes the fewer I'll have to deal with next year. I hope.
Bill
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Bill, I think we in South Florida were the first area hit in the US by TYLCV. So we have been dealing with it for a long time. One of the things we noticed is that a few years ago there were far less calls to the Master Gardener help desk about what to do about whiteflies. We have also seen less infestation degree. It's theorized that things/predators have finally decided that it's good to eat and have moved into the area and are controlling the populations much better. So there's a lot of time but there is hope in the future for your crops. And now yellow sticky traps control mine quite easily, as long as I put them out about every 5 feet. Part of my advantage I guess is that I have to garden when it's cooler and they're not quite as active.