Spiraling whitefly - the story continues.
Mar 5
posted by Mark Christie in
Hot Chilli Gardens
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With the onset of the wet season here in Darwin, I wasn’t sure if the whitefly were going to increase or decrease. Combined with moving the chilli plants around to get the best position for both sun and water I was worried that I was creating a centralised smorgasbord for those annoying little critters.
Resisting the urge to spray chemicals, even white oil on the leaves, I hoped that they would find tastier leaves elsewhere.
Speaking of tastier leaves, My Mom and Dad’s chilli trees were producing so much fruit I wondered what I was doing wrong. They had sun, water and were visited at least once a day as Helen, Joe and I usually wander around the yard after work discussing the day’s events.
The missing ingredient for my plants (which are all in pots) was dynamic lifter, or rather “chicky-poo-pellets” which is chicken manure that has been rendered as pellets that look a lot like dark chicken feed pellets.
Dad had given me a small bag to try and after applying to pellets to a number of our plants ranging from jalapeno, habaneras, cayenne and birdseye chilli there was a great fruiting within a week or two of applying the chicky-poo..
During one of our visits to Mom and Dad’s block we decided to make a big combined batch of my chilli sauce recipe which has to be the simplest recipe under the sun – blended fresh Chilli, crushed fresh Garlic, can of peeled tomatoes, black pepper and then the vinegar/sugar mix to your liking that balances and offers some preservative to the sauce.
There is a lime tree near where Dad plays bowls at Humpty Doo and we used six of the limes from this tree to provide the vinegar (sour) flavour to the sauce. These limes, known as Darwin limes are incredibly juicy and the trees are prodigious in the amount of fruit they bear.
The chilli mix used in the sauce amounted to 400g with stalks of mainly birdseye (300g) and the balance being habaneras, jalapeno and cayenne chillies from our yard.
The secret to this sauce is the mix of chilli. It doesn’t really matter about the percentage of one chilli over another, and if you like the flavour of the jalapeno and the heat of the Birdseye, you can mix and match to create a flavouring that is suited to you. By balancing the hot chilli with the not so hot chilli, you can retain flavour and sufficient bite to be able to call it a chilli sauce.
The tomatoes are what “water down” the bite of the chilli. With the amount of chilli described above, I was able to make 4.5 litres of chilli sauce which was a free flowing sauce requiring minimal shaking before use.
I describe this sauce as my “TLC” sauce. Apart from the fact it is made with tender loving care, it also reflects the taste across the palette in that order – Tomato, Lime and then Chilli.
As usual I digress. The important thing that happened in regard to the nasty spiraling whitefly at our house was that I took some leaves into Haidee at entomology after she gave me a new batch of the minute encarsia wasp, which is a natural predator to the white fly.
Haidee gleefully informed me the next day that prior to this latest batch being released, the wasp had already established itself in my garden.
When I say wasp, these things are less than a millimetre long and harmless to humans. So the battle of good over evil using a natural predators rather than chemicals was being won in our back yard. Shortly we hope to not only be harvesting chilli for our sauce, but encarsia wasps for distribution to other affected areas of Darwin.
Vanessa, my work colleague found out that the spiders in her back yard were the brown widow, a relative of the red back. I think I’ll take my chances with the spiralling white fly.
