Hey, good afternoon, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm
Well today I want to talk about aphids and how to combat them in your garden
I went into my greenhouse today and I found that my roses are well ahead of schedule like that guys in bud
But there's a couple back here that are in full bloom already. That's what happens in a greenhouse. My plants are well ahead
but what I also found is that this plant here is
covered in aphids at least on the tip of the plant here not further down, but just up where the flower buds are and
That's something that happens in my greenhouse early on in the season
I usually get a couple of quick outbreaks of aphids and then they're brought under control by
natural enemies I get the question for my customers about how to deal with this and
The punchline of this video is I don't think it's very effective
To use chemical pesticides on aphids either on ornamentals or probably even on vegetables as well
So let me go through it quickly here to talk about
The nature of aphids and how to fight them in your garden
so first of all
Aphids are a soft bodied insect and they usually suck juices from plants just the same way that mosquitoes suck juices from you
except that when
An aphid does it they stay there... Because the the plant isn't gonna swat them off so
The there's two generations of aphids
There's the sexual generation which has wings and what they do is their job is to reproduce like do their there
do their they're nasty and then put eggs all over the soft tips of
Plants in places where there's going to be lots of juices. So the flower buds soft leaves growing shoots
That kind of thing and then the next generation of aphids that is born and what they do
They don't they don't bother flying around
they just stick their mouthpiece into that soft juicy part of the plant and start filling up with plants out and
They're born pregnant not with
Sexual offspring that generation of aphids doesn't do sexual offspring what they do is they have clones of themselves
So it's a very effective way of them to infest a plant very very quickly
Okay, what kind of damage will they do? Well, as I say in my case, it's usually a small amount of cosmetic damage
Transient, but how serious can it be?
Well, if it isn't brought under control pretty quickly
What they'll do is they'll leave behind a lot of droppings - so they suck the juices
there's something called honeydew that comes out the other end and
All of that plus if if a predator comes through and eats them even so you're left with these skeletonized or
leftovers of aphids plus they're poop and there can be sooty mold that moves in so
Imagine if you're growing cabbage and you have a leaf that's covered with the leftovers of aphids
And sooty mold that probably isn't very appetizing. So it really basically can render your plant
Unusable, so that's the worst case scenario usually in my garden. It doesn't come to that but
Well, let you know the scope of the problem second thing I want to say about aphids is that they are everywhere I mean here
On the west coast I'm told they get picked up by warm air currents coming through
Hawaii and they get carried all the way across the Pacific and rain now from the sky into our gardens during those
Those south winds so that's pretty amazing. But even so the populations of aphids that exist here
Reproduce quickly, they turn into winged aphids and they fly around and they infest people's gardens
So it actually is pretty hard to say that you could exclude aphids from your garden and they reproduce so quickly
So you will be dealing with aphids at one point or another if you're a garden here and gardener in a temperate climate
The third thing I want to say about them is that
even though the first two things I said that they're very common they can cause damage and that they're
Really hard to exclude but that being said the infestations are usually not that serious
and the reason for that is if you look at them, they're like
slow-moving
Balloons full of plant juice. I mean, they're not
hard to kill
and there's lots of enemies lots of natural enemies in the garden who want to make a meal out of aphids and
For that I will say the ladybug larvae is one of the prime examples but also, you know pirate bug
there's a
There's an a wasp called aphidius wasp which is a wonderful example of something that lives on aphids
Exclusively and what it does it's a small wasp, you wouldn't see it flying around the garden
it's all it's almost not visible to the naked eye and what it does is it lays its eggs inside the aphids and
Then like something out of an alien movie
those eggs hatch and then eat the aphid from the inside out and then burst over the world then go and lay their eggs and
A bunch more aphids. So aphids are easy pickins
They're they're usually product of control by natural predators or pests of their own. So
Does that mean you don't have to worry about them?
Well, I guess the fourth point I would make is to say there's lots of things that you can do in your garden
to bring in plants that help to establish those populations of
Natural predators or beneficials in your garden and what the those plants do is they provide pollen sources?
Habitation they provide
You know, they're they're the right plants and so I've looked those up
I've planted a bunch in my garden, but the trick to this is to plant a bunch of diversity, you know
So that you have things that are blooming all the way through from the earliest part of the season
all the way through to the later parts of the season and are the kinds of plants that these beneficials like
So let me show you some of those out in the garden here
when choosing plants to encourage beneficial insects one thing to look for is early blooming plants and
in the mustard family
There's a lot of early bloomers that encourage a whole range of beneficial insects
This one here is a plant called Crambe or sea kale
good for eating the leaves, but also excellent for encouraging beneficial insects in the garden and
also early bloomers here on the Left that's Brunnera and
On the right there, that's dicentra
Small flowers like those are fantastic for encouraging. They provide pollen for those little aphidius wasps
and
early
Beneficials that I'd love to chow down on a fits as they get established
And these ones are still in pots in my greenhouse here
But this is a poached egg plant llimnanthes douglasii which is particularly beloved of hoverflies
which also are
prolific
Predators of aphids in the garden. Well right out here in my perennial garden beds
and mine don't mind the weeds, but that's astrantia here there that the
Beneficials will love this one here is sweet Sicily which anything in the carrot family those little tiny
White flowers the tiny flowers of the carrot family
Further over here. I've got salvia coming up
I've got agastache coming up all of those will benefit I guess the punchline here is to have a
wide variety of
perennials and flowering plants
aside from just one or two types
You want to try to increase your diversity too to improve the habitat for all those beneficials
okay, I just showed you a handful of plants that I've put in my garden that I think will help to fight aphids throughout the
Season but there's a whole list. I mean you could look at alyssum. Lobelia fennel. I mean, there's just a ton of them
So I'll put a list below the video here to show you which plants I really recommend to fight aphids in your garden
One thing I would say is that I really recommend this natural approach to fighting aphids because aphids are fast
Reproducing and that's something I covered at the front end of the video here
So if what you do is you tackle them with?
Chemical pesticides they're going to turn that's going to target things other than the aphids
So if you went into the greenhouse and you just did a general spray of an insecticide
You're gonna wipe out the aphids sure, but then you're going to wipe out all the beneficials as well
And then what you do is you're basically resetting the clock the fastest
Reproducing thing once the residual and that pesticide comes off
The fastest reproducing thing is going to be the aphids and it's going to start that infestation over again
Whereas what
I find in my garden
This is my experience both in my greenhouse and my garden is that I usually get a couple of aphid infestations
Early in the season, but then they're brought under control
relatively quickly by their natural predators and then I don't have to deal with aphids much throughout the rest of the season you may
See one or two here and there but it's not it brings everything back into balance
So once that are in balance with their predators aphids aren't a big problem in your garden
And so by throwing in pesticides they're you upset that natural balance, and then you're basically going to be fighting aphids
With those chemicals all the time. All right, if you have any questions on this comments concerns
Please leave those below the video and thank you so much for watching today