Eggplant Insects and Pests

Eggplants seem to be among the strongest and strongest of all garden plants: with their deep roots and lignifying stems, they resist wind and do not necessarily require stakes, and if they are guaranteed good soil fertility. they are fairly easy to grow. organically.

In order to harvest healthy and abundant fruits, it is important to know and know how to manage common adversities, and in this article we review the main animal pests, suggesting methods and products with low environmental impact for the phytosanitary defense against insects that can attack eggplants.

The remedies we offer are valid both for those who have a professional organic cultivation for the sale of vegetables and for those who manage their own garden to have healthy vegetables and do not want to resort to harmful chemical insecticides.

potato beetle

Always associated with potatoes, dorifora also very often attacks eggplant, since the two horticultural crops belong to the nightshade family. The dorifora’s favorite host is still the potato, but in some years the insect is so aggressive that it even eats the foliage of the eggplant, especially when the aerial part of the potatoes is now dry.

The dorifora is a beetle which completes 2 to 3 generations per year, hibernates in the ground when it is adult and reappears in the spring, causing damage mainly from May-June. During her lifetime, each female lays up to 700-800 yellow-orange eggs, which can be found in clusters on the underside of leaves.

One of the best precautions farms can take is to keep the culture of the potato that of the aubergine, and above all always apply the rotations to prevent the adult forms that overwinter underground, once spring returns, from finding easy life, which is their favorite culture once again present in this space.

But in itself this is insufficient and some treatment is usually necessary. , for example with Spinosad products, which are repeated several times during the season. In small orchards manual deletion of the insect generally already shows a strong power of abatement, but it must be frequent and scrupulous, with inspections of the underside of the leaves.

Dorifore on eggplant plants. Photo by Sara Petrucci.

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