John Kempf shows a Pennsylvania farm where Jolly Elf grape tomatoes stay aphid-free while Canadian thistle and lamb's quarter weeds just 2.5 feet away are heavily infested with black aphids. When the crop is healthier than surrounding plants, aphids feed on the weaker hosts instead.
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All right, so I'm out here on.
A farm in eastern Pennsylvania that we've been working with for several years in a Haygrove High tunnel with jolly elf grape tomatoes.
And we have some really interesting things to see here with the insects that.
Are attacking the weeds versus the tomato crop. So got several pieces I want to show you here. If we look at these tomato plants, you can see that we have really healthy dark green leaves. And there's no insects of any kind. There's no aphids, no insects. The plants are perfectly healthy. Can't really see anything at all.
Now, when we go down to the.
Base of this tomato plant, we can.
See that we have some Canadian thistles here. And these Canadian thistles are completely loaded with aphids. There's a tremendous aphid population here, and they're completely annihilating the Canadian thistle, and they're not touching the tomato plant. So here we have this Canadian thistle. We've got these tomato leaves that are right beside the Canadian thistle. And the bottom of these tomato leaves have no aphids on them, whereas this Canadian thistle leaf is completely loaded. So this is an example of a.
Field in which the crop is healthier than the weeds. And as soon as the crop becomes healthier than the weeds, then the insects actually begin attacking the plants. So we can see we pulled out a couple Canadian thistle plants earlier that were right beside this plant, and they are absolutely loaded. There's a tremendous aphid population in here at the crowns, where we have a lot of aphids on every one of these plants all the way through. And we're actually. It looks like the aphids are going to be successful at completely killing these thistle plants at the rate they're going at right now. So it's pretty impressive, and it's a lot of fun when things begin working the way they have the potential to work. So here we are out in the same tomato greenhouse that I was in earlier, over at the edge of the.
High tunnels, and we're seeing something similar to what we were seeing on the Canadian thistles on the lamb's quarter crop. Here we have lamb's quarter that is completely loaded with black aphids. And the black aphids have pretty much stunted the lamb's quarter. You can see this on this entire patch here, lamb's quarter is really pretty much shutting down and isn't going to last too much longer at the rate that it's going right now.
So that's compared to a healthy tomato crop that is literally two and a half feet away and has absolutely no.
Black aphids on it.
So it's a really nice crop. Looks really good. And the weeds don't look so good.
