I have a confession to make.
I have been Less Than Vigilant. Actually, I’ve been downright lacksadaisical in my approach to veg gardening: a quick swish round with the watering can, dig up a few spuds for tonight’s tea, and then dash off to my desk to fit in the twenty thousand urgent tasks I should have done by yesterday. Which is a slightly beating-around-the-bush way of saying I’ve been a bit too busy to pay my poor veg plants as much attention as I’d like.
As almost always happens when you turn your back for a little while, the bugs move in. I’ve already suffered a greenfly outbreak earlier this year: they arrived in numbers undreamt of in previous years, possibly something to do with the cold winter, or global warming, or both.
I should have known that where greenfly lurk, blackfly won’t be far behind. And so it has turned out. I went to have a look and see if any of my broad beans were ready to eat the other week: and the black plague had moved in while I wasn’t looking.
I had done what all good broad bean growers do back in May, and pinched out the tender tops of my broad bean plants to put the blackfly off – it removes the bits they like best, so the theory is that they go find something else to eat – and though it’s worked in previous years, this year the numbers have been so great that it’s made not a jot of difference.
They’ve not only taken over the broad beans: they’ve moved in on the runners and the climbing French, too. Spreading like sticky black soot up stems, splaying out over the undersides of the leaves, swarming over buds and flowers, they turn everything black, black, black. Sadly that includes many of my embryo broad bean pods: blackfly suck sap, voraciously, and that means stunted growth and poor, grey, shrivelled beans. You cannot let such mayhem go unchecked.
Had I been doing what good vegetable growers do, I would have spotted my blackfly infestation at a much earlier stage because I would have been checking my plants carefully every few days, keeping an eye out for anything going wrong.
I would have spotted the little blighters as soon as they crept out of their horrid little eggs – unlike greenfly, which camouflage themselves so effectively, blackfly show up beautifully against green stems and leaves. Then I would have squished them with great relish between thumb and forefinger. It’s a simple – if a bit skin-crawling – way to nip a blackfly attack, quite literally, in the bud.
It’s a little late for that now up at my plot, though. I did try to squish the blackfly on the runner beans and got a modicum of success, at the price of fingers black and squidgy with mushed blackfly (whoever said gardening was a romantic and beauty-filled pasttime clearly didn’t grow veg).
Incidentally, when you have volumes of mushed blackfly of this order you can make a solution of squished pest and spray it back on the plant to deter future attacks. Apparently the spray smells of the danger hormone they give off as they die. I’d like to assure you that this is second-hand knowledge as I have never tried this: the idea of dead blackfly sprayed all over my broad beans, to say nothing of the process of actually making the stuff, is so unappetising that I’d rather just let the blackfly get on with it.
Anyway: I’m having to resort to other tactics. I blew some of them off simply by blasting the plants with a hose on a middling-high pressure setting: if you actually jet-wash them you do tend to blast off the buds and flowers too, so this is definitely a method to use with care, and only really on the main stems and leaves.
For buds and my poor beknighted broad beans, I’m afraid I’ve reached for the spray gun and I’m coating my plants every few days until the blackfly give up the ghost. So far, so good: the black army has been stopped in its tracks and is definitely in retreat. It’s all right – I haven’t gone chemical, as these days there are, thank goodness, organic insecticidal soap sprays you can buy off-the-shelf.
If I was organised and efficient, I would have collected up all my little odds and ends of old bathroom soap in a jar, mixed them with water and used that: just as effective, and doesn’t cost a penny (it does tend to clog up the nozzle on your spray gun though – soaking it in clean water between uses seems to sort it out).
However, of course if I was organised and efficient, I wouldn’t have a blackfly problem in the first place. And I’d have some decent broad beans to harvest. If that isn’t an argument for taking five minutes to look over your crops every morning, I don’t know what is.
Thanks for this very encouraging post. My broad beans are crawling with blackfly and I have just been searching for some advice – I didn’t know there was anything I could do! Very glad to see that you can get organic insecticide which might be what I’ll have to resort to.
I have been advised to try planting Spanish Fly Plant seeds (Mini Lobata). Apparently you just need to plant one at each end and one in the middle and the black fly will attack these and not your precious runner beans. I have bought some seeds and I’m definitely going to give them a go next year. Watch this space