Mars attacks! and other stuff...

It has been quite a long absence from the blog in the past weeks due to the amount of works going on - planting, setting up of the irrigation system and above all, Martians attacked two fields just planted.

This was the not so pleasant sight we were welcomed with one morning:

  

So, who or what is to thank for this? After a brief search, we found a number of those insects, all part of the Otiorhynchus  gang, hanging around on the small olive trees. Most of them looked like this

and this

which I must say was quite a surprise, as we put on all the trees a supposedly working trap made of a white wooly material which was supposed to stop them on their climb towards the top of the plants. Just to give you an idea of how this trap looks, here is a pic of a field equipped with the said trap

You may guess how we felt when we saw the young trees all scarred by the said insects, since we were expecting the trap to work. And boy, look how it was working: we put some of the insects on both an already mounted trap

and on a horizontal strip of a brand new one (the "old" one is say a week old, and is supposed to last at least a year...)

As you can see, the drag race we witnessed was the total opposite of what the white textile was supposed to do - i.e. stop the insects from walking over it!). Quite a loss of money and time with this one.

The actual problem is that whilst a grown up olive tree does not suffer that much from a few eaten leaves, a young plant can suffer a setback in vegetative growth of various years, or even die. Since it was not time to sit down and commiserate, we had to spray all the infestated plantations to try and keep the damage under control. But, and here it becomes interesting, there's no known working organic insecticide for those insects (Go figure! They must be from Mars...), so we have to rely on repellents to keep them from eating. In first place we sprayed them with a H2O/sulphur solution (which evaporates in a day or two, therefore having quite a short deterring effect). Gotten few days of truce, we are now preparing some herbal solutions which should have a more potent deterring effect than the readily available, but  mild, sulphur. More on those later.