Red Alert! Red Alert! APHIDS

2 Parts Rubbing Alcohol

5 parts water

few drops dish soap.

few drops peppermint oil.



These aphids adore my cabbage....   compost the APHIDS!    or at least give them a bath of this.



Lady  bugs will have nothing to do with these beings as they have some sort of powdery substance on them...    



So, I gave them a good hit with the spray bottle this morning of this brew.

Did the plant receive lots of nitrogen recently? If the N:S ratio is high, amino acids will build up and attract aphids. The spray will set them back for a while but they will keep rebouncing.

I am now more inclined to the opinion that plants getting balanced nutrition are healthy and pest free. Here is what John Kempf talked about aphidshttps://permies.com/t/146343/prevent-manage-aphids-insects-managing

Although I don't have experience of adding S/Mg/B to get rid of aphid infestation, I had the other way round. Once I made organic liquid fertilizer from some sick looking plants and used on my healthy ones. Within a week, all had attracted some sorts of sap suckers on corresponding hosts! Lady bugs showed up later to clean the aphids up but the plants already lost quite some growth potentials.

May Lotito wrote:Did the plant received lots of nitrogen recently? If the N:S ratio is high, amino acids will build up and attract aphids. The spray will set them back for a while but they will keep rebouncing.

This is true, but it is also true that the plant needs nitrogen...

If they come back I will put the entire grow bag about 3 feet deep in water, I will see how well they swim ;-)

I also notice that aphids and other bugs thrive when nitrogen exceeds what a plant needs. Sometimes I observe this effect after a summer lightning storm as well, because lightning oxidizes nitrogen into forms plants can use.

The story I tell about nitrogen goes like this...

The natural world consistently runs on a shortage of nitrogen. Therefore, plants never developed mechanisms to stop absorbing nitrogen. They just take in all the nitrogen they can find. Then, they get poisoned by too many amino acids which come from the nitrogen, so they call out to the ecosystem for help. Bugs need amino acids to build their bodies, so in their compassion and good will, they travel to the plant to help it out, by sucking away the excess, or chomping some leaves so that other leaves can live, once nitrogen levels moderate.

Spraying aphids with a strong jet of water from a garden hose can knock them off the plant, and they croak before finding it again.

I was watching a test of different soil mixes and the ones that had higher nitrogen had more aphids.    


I have been using a foliage feed that is high in nitrogen which has worked awesome on my tomatoes....

This video had good  control methods,   of cutting off infected leaves, and spraying off the aphids from the plant...




I have noticed if my sweet potatoes get too much nitrogen they stunt and stop growing....     The leaves get an amazing green color, but the growth rate halts.

I have been attempting to use Korean natural farming to get the soil life to give what my plants need, but I am a newbie at this, and I am slowly stumbling my way thru using these methods.  

It is my understanding that if you get rid of the ants th aphid problem goes away.

Vinegar works for getting rid if ants.

I often see this kind of infestation on my brassicas when it hasn't rained in a while. Blasting them with water helps, as does a soap-based spray. Next time I'll try the recipe with the alcohol.

"It is my understanding that if you get rid of the ants th aphid problem goes away.
Vinegar works for getting rid if ants."

How do you apply the vinegar?

I noticed the appearance of aphids after heavy storm too, at the same time plants are showing sulfur deficiency symptoms. S and B exist as anions and leach easily down past the root zone in high rainfall. Usually in corns, I see S deficiency associated with aphid the sap sucker and boron deficiency with earworm the tissue muncher. For soil amendment I use gypsum and borax. If you have other cabbages, maybe you can give one some Epsom salt and see if that reduces aphid loads.

Mart Hale wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:"It is my understanding that if you get rid of the ants the aphid problem goes away.
Vinegar works for getting rid if ants."

How do you apply the vinegar?

I use a spray bottle usually.  If ants have trails I might pour the vinegar directly onto those trails.

Other aphid predators include green lace wings, wasps (of which 95%+ are harmless to people) and brachanid flies. All of these have a pollen/nectar dependent stage of their life cycle. Simple white and yellow flowers, like yarrow, queen anne’s lace, alyssum, cilantro, fennel and other umbels provide easy to access food for this stage of those aphid pests’ life cycle. I had a marked drop in aphid and other pest and disease problems in year 3 of my current garden ecosystem’s succession. This was also true with other projects. The use of minimal nitrogen and always having it in a complex organic form has also likely helped reduce the protein glut produced by nitrates that feeds those suckers.

Ben Zumeta wrote:Other aphid predators include green lace wings, wasps (of which 95%+ are harmless to people) and brachanid flies. All of these have a pollen/nectar dependent stage of their life cycle. Simple white and yellow flowers, like yarrow, queen anne’s lace, alyssum, cilantro, fennel and other umbels provide easy to access food for this stage of those aphid pests’ life cycle. I had a marked drop in aphid and other pest and disease problems in year 3 of my current garden ecosystem’s succession. This was also true with other projects. The use of minimal nitrogen and always having it in a complex organic form has also likely helped reduce the protein glut produced by nitrates that feeds those suckers.

I waited a a season just letting these things go waiting for a predator to come eat them...

None came....

Trying to grow some milkweed now as I heard they were helpful for aphids treatment.

Mart Hale wrote:

Ben Zumeta wrote:Other aphid predators include green lace wings, wasps (of which 95%+ are harmless to people) and brachanid flies. All of these have a pollen/nectar dependent stage of their life cycle. Simple white and yellow flowers, like yarrow, queen anne’s lace, alyssum, cilantro, fennel and other umbels provide easy to access food for this stage of those aphid pests’ life cycle. I had a marked drop in aphid and other pest and disease problems in year 3 of my current garden ecosystem’s succession. This was also true with other projects. The use of minimal nitrogen and always having it in a complex organic form has also likely helped reduce the protein glut produced by nitrates that feeds those suckers.

I waited a a season just letting these things go waiting for a predator to come eat them...

None came....

Trying to grow some milkweed now as I heard they were helpful for aphids treatment.

It will take more than one season for an ecosystem to get reestablished, as predators breed more slowly than their prey. 3yrs is pretty common in restoration for pollinator and predators to come back in balance with their food supply. I would just avoid interventions that kill predators as well as the pest, which it seems most sprays do (I had a homemade lemongrass spray that worked on mites and aphids, but also killed other things too). Also remember, even if its just hand crushing, if we kill off the pest, we kill off their predators even moreso, and the pests will still persist elsewhere and come back to a site full of food and devoid of predators and then explode in population. If surrounded by biocide laden land, it can be much harder, but those small predators are an indicator of what pollutants in that environment do to living things, with 10x the potency for every step up the food chain. I am lucky to be on the edge of a national forest, which meant native beneficial predators were around.

Yeah I have brought in nematodes that go after stinging nematodes...      I was considering some that go after leaf miners which decimate my crops.

I am consdering building a secured area that is covered with insect netting..

I can grow taro, cassava,    white yams,   figs without issue,  along with bolivian sunflower....      These are my main crops to stay alive.      I would like to grow more that does not require me to spend so much effort to keep going.

Well, use of the first spray I made, along with removing the leaves that were aphid infested helped alot.

I was able to harvest some cabbage from this, and I learned good lessons on preventative..

I found inside the grow bag there was a nest of ants that were farming the aphids.       That grow bag is now being held down with a cement block under water to finish off the ants.        

I still have cabbage growing in other areas that have other problems, with worms, but at least I am getting better at this war for my food.