Recognize the problem
The Potato leaf miner is an insect and is also known as "urunyo rw'ibirayi" in Kinyarwanda. You can see damage by this insect on the leaves of the potato plant. The young stages of the insect live and feed inside the leaves, making tunnels as they feed along. The tunnels are grey-brown in colour and you can see them.
Background
Tunnel damage on potato leaves.
P. Ridland
Adult insects make a hole in the leaf to lay eggs inside. The eggs hatch inside the leaf and the young insects are very small, yellow in colour, and worm-like. They feed inside the leaf, leaving the tunnels as they feed through the leaf. If there is too much damage the leaves will dry up and the plant will die.
Management
Adult leaf miner.
Texas AgriLife
•
Put yellow sticky traps in your crop to catch the adult insects: Find a 100x160mm weather proof or cardboard sheet and paint it yellow, cover with castor oil or petroleum jelly and suspend it above the crop and put them at 2-3 m distant and change them every week.
•
Pick and destroy all infested leaves and destroy all unwanted plant material after harvest
•
Plough and hoe your soil at least one week before planting so that any of the insects resting in the soil will be dried by the sun and will die.
•
Use a neem based pesticide, either:
◦
Neem seed extract, at 60 g per 1 litre of water. Spray to just about covering the plant, once a week until the problem is gone.
◦
Azadirachtin at rate of 25 g per litre of water, spray it weekly.
•
Use organic fertilizers (farm yard manure) and regular watering to make the plants stronger.
When using a pesticide, always wear protective clothing and follow the instructions on the product label, such as dosage, timing of application, and pre-harvest interval.
Indexing Terms
Descriptors
- amendments
- arthropod pests
- azadirachtin
- botanical insecticides
- cardboard
- castor oil
- chemical control
- control
- cultural control
- farmyard manure
- fertilizers
- hoeing
- insect control
- insect pests
- insecticides
- irrigation
- leaf miners
- manures
- monitoring
- neem seed extract
- organic amendments
- organic fertilizers
- pest control
- pesticides
- pests
- physical control
- plant extracts
- plant oils
- plant pests
- ploughing
- potatoes
- publications
- seed oils
- seeds
- soil
- soil amendments
- sticky traps
- traps
- yellow sticky traps
Organism Descriptors
Identifiers
Geographical Locations
Broader Terms
- invertebrates
- animals
- eukaryotes
- Meliaceae
- Sapindales
- eudicots
- angiosperms
- Spermatophyta
- plants
- Azadirachta
- Hexapoda
- arthropods
- Agromyzidae
- Diptera
- insects
- Solanaceae
- Solanales
- Solanum
- Africa
- ACP Countries
- Anglophone Africa
- Commonwealth of Nations
- lower-middle income countries
- medium Human Development Index countries
- West Africa
- Africa South of Sahara
- East Africa
- Francophone Africa
- Least Developed Countries
- low Human Development Index countries
- low income countries
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Applicable geographic locations
Africa, Ghana, Rwanda
Copyright
© CABI 2012. This article is published under aCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)Published under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence
History
Issue publication date: 1 January 2012
Published online: 3 October 2012
Language
English
Authors
Metrics & Citations
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