How to treat currants and gooseberries from diseases and pests: tips for early spring

04.01.2023 11:06

Currant and gooseberry bushes are among the first to be treated in the garden. This often happens when there is still snow on the ground.

For this purpose, chemical solutions are used to neutralize harmful aphids, sawflies, weevils, mites and other parasites.

Frightened by the side effects of chemicals, summer residents do not even approach the shelves, choosing harmless biological preparations or folk remedies.

However, at this time it is still too early to use bio-developments, and therefore useless, and various folk remedies are good at best only as a means of prevention, but not control.

Therefore, infusions of weeds and other food waste, as well as "Bitoxibacillin" and "Fitosporin" (effective at temperatures above 10 degrees Celsius) should be put aside.

Gooseberry
Photo: © Belnovosti

In early spring, you can safely use chemicals. At this time, there are no greens or flowers, and therefore it is premature to worry about the quality of the harvest.

How to protect currants and gooseberries

Measures to protect these relatives begin before the buds swell.

1. First, all suspicious and damaged shoots are cut off at the base and burned.

2. Then they tidy up the area around the bush, burn the remains of last year’s vegetation, and loosen the soil.

After swelling and at the moment of budding, processing begins.

1. Apply a layer of mulch up to 6 cm onto the loosened soil. This will stop the invasion of leaf and stem gall midges.

2. Currant bushes are watered abundantly with water at a temperature of 60-70 degrees Celsius to destroy aphid eggs.

3. Next, you can carry out treatment with “Aktara”, “Karbocin” or the drug “Fufanon-Nova”.

The latter helps to deal with aphids, scale insects, moths, weevils and raspberry beetles at once. Consumption is 10 ml per 10 liters of water, and one adult bush requires 1.5 liters of solution.

4. The drug "Aliot" (10 ml per 10 l of water) will help stop the gooseberry looper, and "Iskra" (1 tablet per 10 l of water) is effective against moths.

Igor Zur Author: Igor Zur Internet resource editor