How to save your plants when you see leaf miner! 😨

Have you seen this on your beautiful plants?? 😨

It’s called leaf miner. It gets on all kinds of stuff: citrus, tomatoes, basil, etc. Leaf miner is a type of very small fly and they lay their eggs in between the leaf tissue. If you have them, spraying a pesticide is somewhat helpful, but you don’t want to spray something you eat because it gets into the plant tissues and you end up consuming those chemicals.

If you see this tell tale sign of leaf miner on your plants, take off the affected leaves as soon as possible. Once they are out of hand you aren’t going to get them because it’s a larvae within the tissue that’s causing these patterns in the leaves and there’s not much you can do at that point (besides a pesticide, which we already established, you don’t want on plants you are going to eat).

Take all those affected leaves off and cut the plant down to three nodes or so, it should grow back. Unfortunately, this isn't fail-safe, those larvae get into very small leaves; they like the tender leaves that are just sprouting, which makes it even more challenging to get rid of them.

You can spray a general soap to kill the adult flies. It won’t get rid of the larvae, but if you keep spraying once or twice a week, you can keep killing them as they hatch and hopefully eradicate them before they take over completely.

I found this great article that gives some recipes for some homemade, organic sprays that you can try out, as well:

​https://www.gardenislife.com/articles/plant-care/how-do-you-kill-leaf-miners-on-basil​

Don’t forget to use up all of the stuff you cut off that doesn’t have the leaf miner! Here’s a recipe for mint basil pesto that’s absolutely fabulous!

​https://www.heathermichellenutritionist.com/post/fresh-mint-and-basil-pesto​

Here's to keeping leaf miner at bay!