Drill Sergeant Dan

Hey there soldier,

Welcome to boot camp.

My name’s Drill Sergeant Dan and I am going train you to be a lean, mean, aphid-killing machine. You will learn all the battle tactics and weapons you have at your disposal to get rid of aphids from your plants forever.

For too long, the aphids have been destroying our crops and I am here to tell you enough is ENOUGH! It’s time we took up arms and declared war on these vile creatures.

We shall fight on the beaches,
We shall fight on the landing grounds,
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
We shall fight in the hills;
We shall never surrender.

Know The Enemy

Listen up. Knowing your enemy is key to defeating him and understanding an aphid’s strengths and weaknesses will help you destroy them.

Our military scientists have created this accurate depiction of an aphid and it’s anatomy to aid us in the war effort:

Aphid Anatomy

Primary Weapon
An aphid’s primary weapon is it’s stylet. This tube-like device is located on aphid’s head and used to puncture the phloem vessels in a plant and suck out the sap. This results in the plant losing hydration and nutrition causing it to wilt and eventually die. It is our job to protect our plants from this untimely demise.

Secondary Weapon
A good offence is a strong defense, which is why we call an aphid’s cornicle a weapon even though it is defensive in nature.

These abdominal tubes are located on the underside of the aphid and secrete cornicle wax, which is a sticky substance that can render preadators and other threats immobile. There is also evidence to suggest that this wax also alerts other aphids of impending danger.

Camouflage
Aphid’s are masters of disguise and subterfuge. The pictured aphid is green to help it to blend in with the plant it is feeding on, so you need to very observant to spot it. In addition, aphids are found in a variety of different colors including black, brown and beige. Keep your eyes peeled!

Safety in Numbers
Aphid populations are huge and they vastly outnumber us – an aphid colony can increase by 500% every single week. Despite us being in the minority, a well-trained human can wipe out entire colonies of aphids without suffering so much as a scratch.

Primary Weakness
An aphid’s main weakness is it’s soft body and lack of exo-skeleton, which does little to protect them from predators and disease.

Secondary Weaknesses
In addition to their soft body aphids are also small and light, which means (individually) they can easily be knocked off or removed from their host plants.

Many aphids will only feed on one particular type of plant. Therefore, if their source of food is removed, they will quickly die of starvation.

They also make a tasty snack for larger insects in the food chain.

Your Aphid-Killing Arsenal

Soldiers, you have three primary weapons in your arsenal for getting rid of aphids, each of them targeting one of the aphid’s weaknesses.

Your Gun
The best weapon against the aphid scum is your gun, or to be more accurate, your SPRAY GUN.

If you have a mister or spray bottle around your house, you will now refer to it as your gun. But, of course, a gun is nothing without ammunition so you need to load it with your very own aphid-killing chemical.

Mix a little dish-washing detergent (washing-up liquid) with water in your gun and thoroughly soak the enemy with the solution. Because aphids are soft-bodied the chemical weapon will dissolve their outer coat and kill them instantly.

Your Artillery

Time to bring out the heavy weapons. Your artillery, otherwise known as a hose pipe or pressure washer can be used to blast aphids off of your plants and to kingdom-come.

Those that survive the blast of the water cannon will quickly die of starvation without a source of food.

Your Allies
Finally, you have the option of calling in our aphid-hating allies.

Our most powerful allies are the ladybugs (known in some quarters as ladybirds). Although they may look beautiful, don’t be fooled – they are natural aphid killing machines.

Attract or release ladybugs into your garden and you will have a natural and ecological solution to your aphid problem.

Summary

You now know both the strengths and weaknesses of the evil aphid as well as how you can get rid of them quickly and effectively.

Congratulations! You are now a fully-fledged aphid-killing recruit and can now join the war against these despicable mini-beasts.

Onward Brave Soldier!

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In this post, I’ll be sharing with you three great bug sprays that you can purchase for getting rid of aphids and greenfly.

However, before you go out and make a purchase, check out my Guide to Getting Rid of Aphids for free advice on inexpensive methods of getting rid of the pests at home – did you know you can easily make your bug spray for a fraction of the price of commercial alternatives?

Aphid X

Aphid X

Aphid X is one of the best aphid repellents on the market.

It should be applied before an aphid infestation starts and works on the basis of prevention being better than cure.

It is 100% safe for plants,animals and beneficial insects and can also be used on aquatic plant life.

Sticky Aphid Whitefly Trap

Sticky Aphid Trap

Sticky aphid whitefly trap is a 30 square inch weatherproof sticky surface that aphids will stick to and die.

It is basically a kind of flypaper and should be used for infestations of flying aphids and not wingless aphids.

Aphid Guard Dust

Aphid Guard Aphid Control

Aphid Guard is a mechanical pesticide so it kills aphids without using poison (which means aphids won’t grow immune to it and doesn’t harm pets or animals).

Application involves dusting Aphid Guard over your plants every six months to get rid of any existing aphids and prevent aphids colonizing them.

This stuff is only available from the manufacturer via Amazon.

These three products are great for getting rid of aphids, however if you’re looking for cheaper home-made solutions, check out my guide on how to get rid of aphids.

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If you’re a gardener, farmer or horticulturalist (either professional or amateur), at some point you’ll have come across aphids and perhaps cursed at the destruction they’ve caused.

What Aphids Look Like

Aphids are tiny parasitic insects that damage and sometimes kill plant life due to their hunger for the sap that flows within them.

They’re soft-bodied (no exoskeleton) and measure between 1 millimeter and 10 millimeters in length. They vary in color from green, black, brown and even a whitish-pink, however a colony will usually consist of aphids of the same coloring.

They have six legs, two antenna and a feeding tube called a stylet on their heads that they use to pierce the phloem vessels of their host plants to suck out the sap.

Telltale Signs of an Aphid Infestation

Because aphids suck out the lifeblood (sap) of their host, the plant will lose it’s vigor and appear unhealthy. Leaves will curl and change in color from green to yellow and brown and flowers or blossoms will drop off. The stem will droop and the plant itself will wilt.

If your plant is showing these signs, you should check it thoroughly for aphids – sometimes aphids will live on the underside of a leaf making them difficult to spot without close inspection.

Getting Rid of Aphids

There are three primary techniques for getting rid of aphids; killing them with bug spray, hosing them off and biological control. The table below shows each method in terms of how easy, effective and quick they are.

Aphid Bug Spray

You can create your own aphid bug spray (or insecticidal soap) by mixing a little dish washing detergent with water and spraying it on the aphids – make sure you spray liberally and cover the aphids entirely.

The solution will destroy the protective coat of the aphids causing them to leak water and die.

More info on creating aphid spray here.

Hosing

This simple aphid removal method involves firing pressurized water at an aphid infestation through a hose. The aphids will be knocked to the ground and either die of starvation or be eaten by ground-dwelling predator.

More info on hosing aphids here.

Biological Control

Biological control involves introducing aphid’s natural predators (such as ladybugs) to the colony. The predator will kill the aphids and prevent other aphids from colonizing the plants in your garden. This is a very effective long-term solution.

More info on getting rid of aphids using biological control here.

Summary

I would suggest using the hose method in the first instance because it is very easy and will get rid of the majority of aphids. If you continue to have problems with aphids, use the bug spray to finish them off. To reduce populations of aphids appearing on your plants in future, make sure you have plenty of creaturesin your garden that like to eat aphids.

I hope you’ve found this article useful and I’d love to here your comments below.

Danny

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Aphids are members of the superfamily Aphidoidea in terms of taxonomic rank and are also referred to as plant lice, greenflies, blackflies and whiteflies.

They are thought to have been on the planet for around 280 million years. Around four and a half thousand species are known across ten families and they can be found all over the world (however they are more common in temperate regions).

What Do Aphids Look Like?

The image below shows a collection of aphids (shown to scale) at various stages of life.

• A: Adult female aphid
• B: Adult male aphid
• C: Young female aphid
• D: Female aphid laying an egg
• E: Aphid eggs

Aphids in various stages of life

They are soft-bodied insects, which means they have no exoskeleton to protect them from predators.

They can be a multitude of different colors including black, brown and orange, however the most common varieties are green.

They have six legs and two antennae as well as a stylet, which they use for feeding. They stylet pierces the leaves or stalk of a plant and allows the aphid to suck the plant’s sap straight out of the phloem and xylem vessels.

Why Are Aphids a Pest?

Because aphids consume the sap of plant life, they can cause untold damage to crops, which has made them the sworn enemy of many farmers and gardeners.

Given the chance, they will suck all the sap from a plant until it is dead – there is no mutualistic symbiotic relationship, they will simply feed until the plant dies.

This has resulted in the human race developing a number of methods for getting rid of aphids including home-made aphid spray and biological control.

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Aphids are nasty little creatures that can damage and kill plant life by injecting their feeding tube into the leaves and stalk and sucking out the sap. This has resulted in animosity towards them by many gardeners who have found their crop ruined by the insects. In this post I’m going to discuss howto get rid of aphids using biological control.

What is Biological Control?
Biological control is the process of controlling the population of a species by introducing their natural predators to their environment. A form of biological control is to get a cat if your house has a mouse or rat infestation.

Aphid infestations can be controlled by introducing one (or more) of the following species to your garden and plants:

Ladybugs/Ladybirds
Ladybugs (called ladybirds outside North America) are the most effective biological control for aphids and can quickly wipe out large numbers of them and permanently reduce their population. Typically, a ladybug will eat around 5000 aphids during it’s lifetime of between 1 and 2 years. Both adult ladybugs and ladybug larvae can be use to get rid of aphids.

Parasitic Wasps
Parasitic wasps kill aphids by laying their eggs inside aphid’s bodies. After the egg hatches, the larvae feeds on the aphid’s body until it is dead. When fully-grown, the adult parasitic wasp will then seek out more aphids to inject it’s eggs into.

Lacewing and Hoverfly Larvae
These maggots will joyfully chomp aphids before they undergo metamorphism into adults. Then they will lay their eggs near to aphid populations, which will in turn provide a food source for their own young.

How To Obtain Predators
In order to introduce aphid predators to your garden or greenhouse, you first need to obtain them.

You can do this by collecting them yourself from the wild (you can pick up dozens of ladybirds from a simple walk through the countryside), purchasing them from your local garden store or even attracting them to your garden by growing specific plants – nettles, wallflowers, amaranths and herbs such as parsley, sage and mint are good choices.

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Following on from yesterday’s post where I showed you how to create your own insecticide to get rid of aphids, I’d like to share with you this cool video I found on YouTube in which gardener, Jerry Greenfield (yes that is his real name) demonstrates the technique.

As well as the bug spray technique, he also shows another aphid removal technique, which involves blasting the aphids off of plants using the water pressure from a hose.

Jerry has a knack for explaining things in a fun an entertaining way and I’d recommend checking out more of his videos.

TECHNIQUE 1
Now, if the bureaucrats in your neck of the woods haven’t messed up your water pressure, we got a fun way to help get rid of the aphids – it’s kind of like playing a game.

What you do is blast them. You get your hose, get your nozzle and just fire.

[Jerry shoots water on the leaves of his plants to knock the aphids off]

This not only gets the aphids wet, but it pees them off.

TECHNIQUE 2
Now, another way to get rid of your aphids is by using dish washing liquid and water in a spray bottle.

The aphids are sift-bodied critters, so what the soap does is that it covers them and dries them out. And they don’t like that much more than they like the whole spraying with water business.

[Jerry squirts a little dish detergent into a spray bottle filled with water]

So, just a little bit. You don’t have to use this fancy organic soap – any dish washing liquid will do.

We’re gonna shake this all up here and then hope the spray nozzle works.

[Jerry sprays the plants with the solution]

If your gonna use your soap and water mixture, you want to make sure you do that on a cloudy day,like today, or early in the morning because you don’t want to fry your plants.

This is Jerry Greenfield. We’ll see you next time on Survival Garden. Take care now.

Hope you enjoyed the vid.

Until next time,

John

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I thought I’d kick off this blog with a cool recipe for creating your own aphid insecticide spray or insecticidal soap.

As well as killing aphids, this spray is also an effective method of killing other soft-bodied bugs such as mealybugs, spider mites, whiteflies and small scales.

This technique works by removing the protective wax that covers these types of bugs, leading to water leaking from their bodies and dehydration.

WARNING: In the vast majority of cases, the aphids will be killed and the plant will remain unharmed, however this is not always the case – hawthorn, cherry, plum, tomato and sweet pea are particularly susceptible.

You will need:

• An empty spray bottle
• Dish detergent
• Vegetable oil

Directions:

1. Add 1 large tablespoon of dish detergent (washing up liquid) to the spray bottle.
2. Add 2 teaspoons of vegetable oil.
3. Fill the spray bottle with water to dilute the solution.
4. Shake the spray bottle thoroughly to ensure the solution is well-mixed.
5. Spray the solution liberally over the aphids.
6. Return an hour later to rinse the liquid off your plant (to avoid any ill-effects that may occur with some species).
7. Repeat 2-3 times a day until all the aphids are dead.

This is a highly effective method for getting rid of aphids, however there are a couple of drawbacks.

Firstly, this method doesn’t kill aphid larvae and secondly, you must ensure the aphids are covered with the solution when you apply it – it requires full contact, so any aphids walking over solution after application will not be affected.

So get making your own bug spray now

John

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As time progresses, I want to turn this website into massive one-stop source of advice for getting rid of plant pests, so I won’t be focusing on just aphids.

You can find out a little more about me on this page as well as my contact details here and a sitemap to all the pages on the website can be found here.

Also, if you take a look at the top-right of the website, there is a search box that you can use to find specific information.

I hope you like the tips I’m going to share here

John

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