Carrot fly, leek leaf miner: protect your crops!

So, are your carrots starting to come up? Have your leeks been transplanted? One slogan for the vegetable patch:  Carrot fly, leek leaf miner, same battle! It’s high time to protect them.

As a well-informed gardener is worth two, let’s begin with an introduction to these two unwanted visitors:

Carrot fly and leek leaf miner, presentation

Psila rosae and Phytomyza gymnostoma are two dipterans that attack, respectively, carrots, leeks and all alliums in general. No need to dwell on their appearance — a fly is a fly, after all. As you can see in these two photos, these pests tunnel into carrot roots and into the stem of leeks. Damage, more or less severe depending on the year, can even cause the vegetables to rot.

How to protect carrots and leeks?

Besides crop rotation, several methods exist and can be combined:

• pair carrots with leeks as these two vegetables protect each other,
• create an olfactory confusion by planting, in the middle of the row, strong‑scented plants such as coriander, by spraying infusions of lavender, tansy or macerations of wormwood, or by using these same plants as mulch.

• set up physical protection by fitting, hermetically, an insect‑proof net or mesh over hoops. It is, indisputably, the most effective method and if you have planted carrots and leeks on the same bed, you can protect them simultaneously, which is very practical.