You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Garden Friends - LadyBug & Larva, Wasp & Mantis
I do not like aphids. They can appear so quickly and so many they literally can cause leaves to curl up around them and then there is nothing to do but remove the leaves. Ants still crawl in these curled up leaves and milk them. So I like to remove as many as I can and for the leaves not curled up I will spray them with soap and water. They may be good feed for lady bugs but this year the amount of aphids was insane.
Usually a surplus in aphids means a lot of sick/weak plants. Was this year drier or wetter for you?
Also.....you know that the ants actually move and bring the aphids to farm them, right? They will carry them onto plants to milk them.
Yes. I mentioned that in my comment about ants milking. My plants are not sick or weak. Someone said unbalanced soil and that may be a possibility only because it was so hot again this year overwatering could have flushed the nutrients. Otherwise, I do test the NPK plus I use microbes, humik and fulvik acid for healthy root and plant uptake. It is something that has baffled me.