Soignons nos persicaires.
Certains de mes plants de persicaire sont bien verts et les autres sont bien jaunes !
Les plantes jaunies sont dévorées par de minuscules insectes ailés blancs
Un petit « tap tap » de feuilles me montre que si la plante saine contient de jolis taux d’indigotine, en revanche, la plante « malade » en a beaucoup moins. Un détail peut attirer notre attention : les traces laissées par les tiges contiennent beaucoup d’anthraquinones, colorants jaunes typiques de la famille des polygonacées. La plante malade s’est donné du mal pour en faire beaucoup plus que n’en a la plante saine .
Vérifions si la plante fait cela dans l’espoir de se débarrasser de ses prédateurs :
Une bonne infusion de racines de rhubarbe ( mon « champion » en matière d’anthraquinones), est filtrée puis versée dans un pulvérisateur.
Les plantes ont été aspergées hier soir. Ce matin, -bonne surprise- il ne reste que deux malheureux insectes. J’ai renouvelé le traitement ce matin : les quelques survivants « tombent comme des mouches ». on dirait bien que le traitement a fonctionné.
Merci la plante, je n’y aurais pas pensé.
Some of my knotweed plants are very green and others are very yellow! The yellowed plants are being eaten by tiny white winged insects. A little "tap tap" on the leaves shows me that if the healthy plant contains nice levels of indigotine, the "sick" plant has much less. A detail that may catch our attention: the marks left by the stems contain a lot of anthraquinones, yellow dyes typical of the polygonaceae family. The sick plant has struggled to produce much more than the healthy plant. Let's check if the plant is doing this in the hope of getting rid of its predators: A good infusion of rhubarb roots (my "champion" in terms of anthraquinones), is filtered and then poured into a sprayer. The plants were sprayed last night. This morning, -good surprise- only two miserable insects are left. I renewed the treatment this morning: the few survivors "fall like flies". It seems that the treatment worked. Thanks to the plant, I would not have thought of that.
Thanks for sharing! We were a group of people, growing dyer's knotweed this year for a little indigo-workshop. Some of us had the same problem and now they know what to do next year...
We all had different shades of green leaves anyways - we thought it depended mainly on the amount of nutritions in the soil and the location where they were growing. But it didn't seem to effect the amount of indigo in the leaves. Do you have any experience, if fertilizing effects the process of building indigo in the plant?
I ask this also because we had a "problem" when dyeing with fresh leaves. We hammered fresh leaves on cloth and rinsed it afterwards, experimenting with different…