hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today i want to talk to you about
aphids now i've talked about aphids before i made a video a couple years back called how to control
aphids in your garden without using pesticides or without spraying this time i'm going to go
one step further and say if you do get to that point where you do have to spray for the aphids
these are the things that you will use now i do want to recap some of the information in that
video because the general information about aphids are that they are fast reproducing slow moving
bags of plant sap that are easy pickings for any predator in the garden and what that really means
is that they have a population boom early in the season before there are a lot of predators in the
garden but once you have a good established base of beneficial insects in the garden your aphid
problems generally will resolve of their own okay that being said there are times when you'll come
up on your roses you'll come up on particularly your brassicas your cauliflowers your cabbages
and find them covered with a thick layer of aphids and they're doing so much damage to the plant
you just can't wait for nature to balance itself and so today i'm going to go through
a few of the different solutions you can use if you need to get rid of aphids right away
sometimes the best solution may be the simplest and in that category i would say using your hose
and nozzle just set it to a sharp setting and then knock those aphids off of the soft
tips of your plants where they tend to accumulate that's what aphids are going
after they're going after the softest fastest growing part of your plants
with where all the nutrients and sugar is and they're targeting those parts of your plants
so if you hit this on your rosebuds if you hit this on the fast growing tips of your veggies
that will knock the aphids off and aphids don't have a great way they're so slow moving and so
dumb that they can't find their way back up onto those tips of the plants they will die
down in the soil so that's the quickest easiest way to do it it doesn't cost you any chemicals
you don't have to go to the store it's fairly manual so if you miss some aphids which you
generally will do the population will build up fairly quickly but consider this just a stop gap
that until your beneficials arrive this is a good measure to take care of them the second one i'm
going to discuss here is also a fairly low impact method which is just using soap or insecticidal
soap now insecticidal soap is by distinction different than dish soap which most people
will try to substitute it for insecticidal soap is meant not to harm your plants as it does its job
so it's potassium salts of fatty acids which is generally not very harmful to your plant tissues
but it will dry out the aphids upon application so any aphids that are hit with this they'll die
because they'll dry out it'll desiccate them so that's fantastic unlike the the sprayer it won't
just knock them off this has a chance of hitting a large group of aphids and then killing them all
now it only will kill the ones that it touches so you know once again if they're hidden underneath
the leaves if they're uh they're in the nook or cranny of your plant they won't get killed
but for all the ones it does hit it will kill now it does have the negative impact that it can kill
your beneficials as well so if you hit ladybugs or you hit other susceptible predators with the
insecticidal soap it can harm them as well so just be careful of that the third one i'll talk
about is horticultural oil and horticultural oil works similarly to the sorry i'm going to turn
this around so that we have the english side it works similarly to the insecticidal soap in that
you have to apply it directly to the aphids the uh the mode of action is just different with the
insecticidal soap it will dry them out with the horticultural oil it suffocates them so really
they are equally effective the downside being that horticultural oil and oils in general applied to
the plants can be fairly phytotoxic so you'd want to apply them during a cooler portion of the day
you want to avoid applying horticultural oils if you've also applied sulfur to your plants
and you'd be on a watch for the symptoms of of uh of harm or phytotoxicity on the leaves of your
plants that would be burned margins or burned leaf surfaces discoloration okay moving on to
the next one the thing about neem oil is that it actually does interrupt the life processes the
biological processes and the life cycle of insects the downside is it isn't an acute killer so much
i mean i guess applied at a high enough rate it can really damage the population of aphids but
really it takes some time to work it makes it so they can't breed that their biological processes
are interrupted so it's not really a quick way to get rid of a population of aphids so
just keep that in mind it doubles up as a bit of a fungicide and another one that you don't want to
apply during very hot weather the final one i'm going to talk about is pyrethroids and this one
permethrin is the effective ingredient and i would call this like the last resort and as as really as
toxic as i would ever go for some controlling something like aphids aphids are generally
easily controlled by a wide range of products this one here will kill all of the insects on your
plants it's just an acute poison on the plants so if you don't want to go chemically and you don't
want to do that on your veggies i can completely understand that as far as it goes this isn't in
the harshest class of chemicals but just keep in mind that if you apply this to your plants uh it
will kill all of the beneficials all of the aphids all of the pests on the plant if it reaches them
it might might not do a great job of killing spider mites and and other uh pests that are
that are hiding in the folds of your your flowers things like thrips again spider mites on the
undersides of leaves behind their webbing uh but it does a bang-up job of getting rid of aphids all
right that's all i can tell you about controlling aphids in the garden i wish you best luck with
that if you have any questions on the topic of aphids or in general on pest control in the garden
at all please feel free to drop those in the comments below and i'll see what i can do to help