Friday, June 26, 2009

All About Aphids

Yuck! We found several masses of tiny green aphids loitering on the young leaves of our columnar apple tree earlier this week. They were hiding out on the undersides of the leaves, hoping to be clever and avoid our notice. Happily, they hadn't done much damage by the time we discovered them and set out to get rid of them...

Controlling aphids is relatively easy and doesn't require pesticides. There are numerous techniques, and a quick web search will give you quite a few solutions for ridding your plants of them. Spraying a mixture of vegetable oil and water is one popular method. This inhibits the aphids' ability to get oxygen, killing them off. Bringing ladybugs into your garden is another solution. Ladybugs are a natural predator of aphids. And they look cool too!

We turned to good old fashioned water, spraying the little suckers off our tree's leaves with a spray bottle. This seems to have done the trick, although we needed to go back and respray for a couple of days to completely get rid of them.

The experience was a good reminder that regularly inspecting the plants in your garden is a good idea...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

nice work!!