Foolproof Aphid Control and Prevention

In today's video we are going to talk about one of the most annoying pests in the garden, aphids. When it comes to aphids, the thing you have to know is that there are hundreds of different types of aphids. I'm sitting in a Brussels sprout patch here. I'll cut off a leaf here and just show you some of the gnarliness that's going on here. We've got some gnarly aphids here, but you have all sorts of different types. There's green, black, white, red, woolly aphids, pear-shaped aphids. There's aphids that attack different plants. So cabbage aphids, for example, on this one, Brussels sprout, a member of the cabbage family. But out in the front yard there are rose aphids on my climbing roses. So you really have to know the exact type of aphid you're dealing with. But fortunately for you and for me, the way to treat and prevent them ends up being relatively the same. The way that aphids decimate a plant. Fortunately they haven't really destroyed these cabbage yet, but like I mentioned with the Brussels sprouts, they have come in. So here's what they'll do. They will start to colonize a section. Usually these crevices or these nooks and crannies of leaves, but on this Brussels sprout leaf they've really hit the absolute tip of the leaf, which is kind of unusual. But you see this leaf starting to curl in. And the reason why is because all the aphids have colonized this area and they've pierced the tissue of the plant and they're sucking all the sap out of the plant and just really crumpling it from the inside out. Something else that they will end up doing is they will secrete this sort of honeydew-like solution that ends up coming out of them and ants tend to mine them. So you'll see aphids and ants almost in this weirdly symbiotic relationship where the ants are trying to basically eat that honeydew or they're farming aphids for the honeydew, which is a good sign if you're seeing ants crawling all over your plants that you probably have aphids lurking somewhere. So the problem here is, first of all, if I was to eat this cabbage leaf or this Brussels sprout leaf, I probably wouldn't want to, right? Cause it's been so decimated up here at the tip and it's frankly kind of gross. But they can also spread disease. They can spread very quickly if you let them get out of check. So we're going to start now talking about some ways that you can control them. So you have to be able to detect where aphids are in your garden. So let's take a look at this cabbage here. I know these ones back here didn't have an aphid problem. It looks like this one might. And how do I know that? Well, first of all, take a look at this leaf here. This leaf is curled over like this. Cabbage fan leaves really want to be out, out and proud. And they're not here. So if I take a look and I undo this, look at what I see under there. And this is how they're going to show up. They're going to show up in these pockets and these clusters. So let me just get a little brutal here and cut this leaf off. And I guarantee, oh yeah, there's a ton here. So that's your indication. That's one of your primary indications. And you can see what they like to do. There's some up top, but there's way more down below where it's a little bit safer for them to be. And they'll cluster. You'll also notice if you look at just the soil sometimes, you'll see a lot of these sort of aphid exoskeletons as they grow up. Like if I hit this, a lot of stuff's just kind of falling off. That's not all necessarily aphids. Sometimes that's just their exoskeletons that have fallen off and you'll see that debris down below. That's another way that you know that there's aphids. There's another one that you can know if you're just watering your garden and you see this sort of milky substance coming off of the plant. That doesn't necessarily mean it's aphids, but a lot of the times it does. What you'll do is you'll water and you'll see these pools of water kind of come in. There's a couple right here and it won't, it just won't run clear. It'll look kind of funky and you'll go, you know what, I think there's probably something wrong with this plant. Now we need to actually figure out how to get rid of aphids. After this, I'll talk about how to prevent them in the first place, which is really what you should be doing as a gardener. But let's be honest, I clearly haven't prevented them. I need to get rid of them starting with the most serious of infestations. Like the leaf you just saw, if it's really bad, you need to bust out a knife of some kind and come through and just get rid of those leaves. This one is absolutely disgusting. I mean, it really is gross even just to hold in my hand, let alone let it exist in my garden. So on this cabbage, I'm just going to come around and do an audit of all the gnarly super infested leaves. You can even see here, this is one that's just been decimated so much that it's actually fallen off the plant and died. Now this is also a lower fan leaf on the cabbage. It's going to get older sooner, but I see some aphid damage on here. And this is what will happen to your plants if you don't get these under control. Okay, I could keep on going, but I'm starting to see that the leaves are getting a little bit less infested now, which kind of brings us to our next control method, which is a lot less painful than cutting off the leaves of your plants. A lighter touch option that does not require you to decimate your plants with a cutting implement. So make sure that this tip, you do it while the leaves are still attached. I'm just showing this as an example here, is to grab a hose, use either the flat or the cone setting. Probably the only times we ever use these settings in the garden. I'm going to use the flat one here and just blast off the aphids. They're very weak, soft bodied insects. If you get them relatively far away from their target plant, oftentimes they kind of just die there. They don't make it back. So you can cut their population down quite a bit. So here's a leaf, again, an example. Do this to a plant that actually is still attached to the soil, but there's a big old chunk of aphids right here. I'm going to show you how well this works. I mean, those things just vanished. I mean, we cut that down by about 99%. You can also use the cone setting. Like I said, it works really well. You're seeing a little bit of that milky white substance. That's another one of those indications. A couple of things here. Certainly water, probably your lightest touch option. If you want to get a little fancier, you can mix in some Dr. Bronner's, which is a Castile soap, more of a true soap. What that'll do is it'll encase them in the water and it'll actually suffocate them. So you can kill them while getting them off the plant. Finally, if you really want to get fancy, is you can mix in some neem oil as well. We have a whole video on that on the channel, a little recipe for insecticidal soap. Personally, I don't see the need. I think just blasting them off and making sure you do it every so often, maybe while you're doing your watering is oftentimes enough to keep the population low enough to save the plant. There are three more things that you technically could do to prevent and control aphids that I probably wouldn't recommend. So spinosad is a really common organic bacteria that's going to basically kill them when they eat it. The problem with that is they're not really getting too deep into the plant tissue to actually get the spinosad inside of them. So we find it's not the most effective. Next up, you hear all the time diatomaceous earth, which is crushed up diatoms. They're sort of very, very sharp and on soft bodied insects, they can really decimate them. The problem is you got to dust it all over your plant if it rains or if you water, it's rendered ineffective. I find the effort's really not worth the cost both in time and in money. And then finally, and this is the one that I think might shock you a little bit, is you hear ladybugs eat aphids. Now, of course that is true, but I think it's not a good idea to go out to the nursery and purchase ladybugs. Number one, they're really not sourced in that sustainable of a way. And number two, and we're going to get to this in a second, unless you've built an environment in which ladybugs want to exist, you're going to buy them, put them on the plant that has aphids. They may or may not eat those aphids. They might just immediately fly away. So you bought them really to have them do one thing and then peace out. So now we need to talk about really the most effective way to control aphids, which is to never get them. And it comes to prevention. It might not seem like it, but you can create a garden where aphids are much less of a problem than they are in your garden right now. And the way to do that is really focusing on the garden as an ecosystem. So let's start out with soil. With healthy soil, you're not going to need to over fertilize, use synthetics, get your soil conditions out of whack to a point where an aphid senses that that plant is sort of weak and it's easy to colonize and basically consume. So one thing that I've been doing is this cover crop garden out here in the backyard that's kind of just slowly improving all this fill dirt that was here from whenever the house was built. So this stuff is improving the soil, it's breaking up the soil, it's adding nutrients back to the soil and making that soil healthier. But at the same time above ground, you can see there's flowers, there's all sorts of different bugs and insects that are in this ecosystem. So if aphids were to ever get out of control in here, well, there's ladybugs in here that are going to go ahead and eat it. There's assassin bugs, there's all these beautiful predators. So that is one of the best ways to do it. And we have a ton of videos about that on the channel. We just talked about how just managing the overall ecosystem of your garden is very important, but even down to the individual plant. We're back in the Brussels sprout patch. And you remember the plant that I chopped the leaf off at the beginning of the video was this one right here. And I'm chopping more. I mean this one's infested with aphids as well. This is also a shorter plant than the ones literally right next to it. This one, this one, both taller, more healthy and way less aphid pressure. Why is that? It's pretty simple. It's just because these plants are healthier. They are not as stressed. They've been watered appropriately, not underwatered, not overwatered. They haven't been fertilized too much. They haven't been fertilized too little. The heat has been great on them. They haven't gotten too cold. It's really that Goldilocks zone of keeping these plants nice and healthy. Now this one's just a little unlucky. It's planted on the corner. It's not getting as much water and that's probably why it's suffering. In fact, if you look at this bed, something interesting is that both of these are lower. They're in the corners and these are taller. They're in the middle. They're getting more access to all that stuff. So managing the plants on an individual level, much like managing your own health, if you're not exercising, if you're not eating well, what's more likely to happen? Well, you're more likely to get a bacterial or viral infection or to have some sort of pest attack yourself. It's really the same with your plants. And those are the ways to prevent and control aphids. So with that, I hope this arms you with enough ammo to go into the garden and make sure that you have a healthy, productive harvest this year. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.