Went in the morning, first time alone to the farm
Noticed pests on the lemon and Guava plants. Vijay and Sudha said it was Gindar and that it was due to the nearby grasses. On the lemon plants, these small caterpillar like looking pests were eating the leaves. On Guava, noticed one insect had gone inside the stem from the top which Vijay plucked off.
We sprayed Jeevamrit on the plants to control the spread for that time.
On research, they seemed more like lemon caterpillars. They looked like sundi, illi which Palekarji had talked about.
Palekarji mentions the use of Brahmastra to control these kind of pests. So we set out a 3 point action plan to control the pests in the garden.
- For immediate control, we planned on making a neem oil + goumutra +dishwash liquid + water mixture as this was available right away.
- To make brahmastra, we collected the leaves of mango, belpatra, Guava. The 2 other would be papaya and neem. Will make this chutney in the next 2 days so that brahmastra is ready max by Saturday. We need to buy some buckets as well.
- I also ordered Dashparni Ark from TBOF (two brother organic farms). Was available on Amazon. Since this is a all-in-one pest repellant, it should help in case of emergencies. We also asked Shrenik to send over some of his fertilizers and pesticides.
I saw that the plants kept waiting to be planted were going bad. They needed to be planted soon.
In the evening, we pushed ourselves to go plant the rest of the trees. We actually ended up planting all the trees except the shrubs (lemongrass, shankpushpi (aparajita), cardamom)