Growing beets includes not only feeding, watering and weeding, but also the fight against various insects that settle on the tops of this dicotyledonous herbaceous plant and begin to feed on it. Some adult arthropods or their larvae live in the ground. They gnaw the root of a vegetable of the subfamily Chenopodiaceae. As a result, the plant withers and dies.
Beet pests can destroy both young seedlings and an adult plant with already formed roots, so site owners should carefully inspect the beds with crops and promptly destroy dangerous insects.
Beet pests and their control
There are several dozen different arthropods that can harm goosefoots. These are worms, aphids, beetles, bedbugs, flies, moths, as well as their caterpillars and larvae. The danger of many pests is that they multiply quickly, and their colony eats up the leaves and roots in the garden bed in a short time. Untimely noticed by the owners of a summer house or garden, insects can destroy the entire crop or most of it.
People are fighting arthropods using the entire arsenal of available methods. Not only chemical insecticides are used, but also folk remedies. For large beetles, traps are made from scrap materials; small ones are washed off the sheets with a stream of water. They use wood ash and promptly remove weeds, which often harbor pests that later move to neighboring beneficial plants.
Knowing the distinctive signs of dangerous insects, the time of their appearance and effective ways to get rid of them, you can save the root crops in the garden and get a good and healthy harvest.
Beetles
Beetles such as the beet weevil and flea beetles are the main pests of beets, and they are being combated in all corners of Russia.
The weevil is a gray-brown insect up to 13-14 mm long, its scaly body covered with fine hairs. A distinctive feature by which the beetroot beetle can be easily recognized is its front part of the head, elongated into a tube. The beetles overwinter in the soil and emerge in early spring. They are dangerous for plant seedlings, as they eat the cotyledons and bite the sprouts.
These insects love quinoa, which also belongs to the subfamily Chenopodiaceae. In the areas where it grows, the weevils have enough food, so they reproduce more.When several pairs of leaves appear on the seedlings (in the second half of May), each female lays 60-100 eggs in the ground, from which larvae hatch within a week. They feed on the roots of the plant, gnawing holes in them. This spoils the appearance of root crops and causes the tops to wilt and turn yellow. Adult weevils gnaw the petioles and edges of leaves and eat bracts.
A popular measure to combat beetles is to surround the beet bed with small grooves with steep walls. If a weevil ends up in a ditch, it will not be able to get out. Trapped insects are collected and destroyed or sprayed on site with Decis. In the summer, you should pull the quinoa out of the ground in time before its seeds fall on the ground, then next year there will be less food for the beetles in the area and their population will decrease.
Beet flea beetles are tiny insects up to 2.3 mm in length, covered in dark green chitin. They fly from wintering grounds to vegetable gardens in April and first eat weeds. When the goosefoot germinates, the flea beetle feeds on the cotyledons and leaves. Traces of its activity are through holes or holes gnawed in the pulp. The tops then turn yellow and curl. Often the beetle, in addition to the leaves, also eats the growing point, destroying the seedlings at an early stage of life.
In May, fleas lay eggs shallow underground, and after 2 weeks larvae emerge from them. They feed on borage roots for a whole month, but do not cause much damage to them, and then pupate. By August, young flea beetles emerge from the pupae and eat the tops of the plant; soon they fly away for the winter, where they eat weeds.
To save the plantings, you need to treat the beets against pests with wood ash mixed with tobacco dust (1:1 ratio).This should be done before the outside temperature exceeds +18...+19 °C, since fleas begin to multiply in warm weather. Young shoots and leaves of the goosefoot are sprinkled with a wood-tobacco mixture, and after 5 days the procedure is repeated.
Infusions of wormwood or marigold, which are used to water beet sprouts, help fight small bugs. The pungent smell repels insects, and they move to other places. If owners prefer to destroy fleas with chemicals, then Kinfos and Imidor are suitable for this purpose.
Medvedka
A major pest of vegetable gardens is the mole cricket, or earthen crayfish. Even 15-20 years ago, its description and image were found in literature and people looked at the strange insect with curiosity. Now you can see a live mole cricket on your or your neighbor’s property. This orthoptera is capable of moving through the air, and it also ends up in gardens along with manure, in which it likes to overwinter.
The insect reproduces quickly. One female can lay up to 500 eggs in the soil. The larvae emerge from them after 3 weeks, their formation into adults takes 2 years.
The earthen crayfish reaches a length of 5, less often 6-8 cm. A shell is located above its head, which serves as protection for the insect. Of the three pairs of limbs, the first is the most unusual. Wide and powerful paws, similar to mole paws, are designed for digging the soil. Thanks to them, the mole cricket digs long passages in the ground, along which it moves at high speed, looking for food. This arthropod also lives underground in burrows, crawling out at night.
Large insects feed on various root crops, eating them from all sides. In summer they can also eat beet tops. Mole crickets are most dangerous in the spring, when they gnaw through young shoots at the very roots.Often, earthen crayfish eat roots, without which the plantings wither and die.
People use many methods to combat these arthropods. Since mole crickets live underground, they are lured to the surface by pouring several liters of a solution of laundry soap or washing powder into each hole, and then destroyed by cutting off the body.
Traps with beer or honey water are widely used, as their smell attracts insects. The drink is poured into small bottles or jars, and the container is dug into the ground at an angle and the top is tied with a bandage. Mole crickets chew through the fabric and get inside the bottles, but cannot get out. More than a dozen individuals can be crammed into one container.
In autumn, earthen crayfish are fought with manure. Small holes are dug in several places around the site (along the perimeter) and filled with compost. Insects crawl there for the winter. When frost comes, traps are dug out and manure is scattered around the garden. The mole crickets do not have time to get into the ground and die from the cold.
Nematode
In the soil of vegetable gardens there can be many cysts - brown shells of dead females, lemon-shaped, which contain eggs and larvae of roundworms. If beets grow next to the cysts, the larvae gnaw through the shell and use a thin spine near the mouth to penetrate the root. They dissolve plant cells with their enzymes to make them easier to absorb.
This affects the plant, which loses nutrients and develops more slowly: its leaves turn yellow and wither, and many thin roots appear on the root crop (beardiness). Externally, a diseased vegetable looks smaller than a healthy one.
Adult males (transparent worms up to 1.3 mm in length) leave the plant and do not eat anymore.They live in the soil for about a month, returning for fertilization to the females, who, continuing to sit at the surface of the fruit and having enlarged, tear its shell with their backs. Females lay 300 eggs in the egg sac. Soon, adults of both sexes die, and the offspring remain in cysts. The shells can be moved by wind and water across fields.
During the growing season, it is difficult to control nematodes, so a month before planting crops and after harvesting, the soil is treated with nematicides. If the garden is infested with worms and their larvae, then in such conditions the cultivation of root crops will be ineffective. To disinfect an area, it will take 4 years to plant crops on it that are not affected by nematodes (wheat, clover, barley).
Beet fly
Small, up to 8 mm, gray beet flies are pests of sugar beets. In wet weather they lay up to 100 white eggs under the lower part of the leaves. The larvae feed on the pulp of the tops, leaving the skin intact. The cavities inside swell and turn red. Soon the leaves wither and die. Surviving plants produce low-sugar fruits.
To combat flies, goosefoot should be sprayed with insecticides in advance. If this is not done, insects will multiply. The owners are left to inspect the green parts of the vegetable and destroy the discovered clutches of eggs and larvae by squashing them. It is necessary to remove and destroy leaf debris affected by flies, and in the fall, dig up the soil in the garden bed deeply.
Beet bug
The beet bug is a pest of table and sugar beets. This brown or green bug reaches a length of 7 mm. It feeds on leaves and sprouts of vegetables.Yellow-green larvae, which emerge from 200 eggs laid by the female, eat the pulp of the tops. The fight against them is carried out with the help of Dynadim and Fufanon, and the greens are sprayed with solutions.
It is also necessary to treat autumn clutches of eggs with drugs, which are resistant to cold and can overwinter in the soil, regenerating into adults in the spring.
Mining moth
Holes on the leaves of the beet plant are also left by the leaf miner, an insect 6-7 mm long with a wingspan of 14 mm. This brown butterfly is dangerous because during the warm period of the year, 4 generations of caterpillars emerge from its eggs. May and June larvae feed on tops, which turn black and dry out. The other two generations penetrate the root crop and gnaw holes in it.
They fight moths with the same means as bedbugs. After harvesting, cut tops are not left in the area where they grew.
Phoma and cercospora blight of root crops
It's not just insects that harm the goosefoot. Plants are affected by cercospora and fomoz - diseases that appear due to weak seeds, bad weather conditions, contaminated soil and improper care of plantings. Phoma, a fungal disease, causes round yellow spots or dry heart-shaped rot to form on the lower leaves. Beet cercospora appears on the tops of adult plants as brown spots with a red border up to 4 mm in diameter. Damaged leaves curl, and fresh ones begin to grow in their place. Root crops of diseased crops are small and have poor shelf life.
To protect plants, you need to sow the beds only with treated seeds of disease-resistant varieties. Complex fertilizers should be applied to the soil for crops. To prevent diseases, it is necessary to water the tops with preparations containing copper.During the growing season, you need to thin out the plants, removing the weakest of them and damaged leaves. Root crops should be weeded in a timely manner, because fungal spores can get onto the beets from the weeds.
