How to Get Rid of APHIDS

Aphids are jerks. Let's kill them. Hey, I'm Brian with Next Level Gardening. If you're looking to join an online garden community that offers tips, tricks, and support to help you take your garden to the next level, you're in the right place. Click subscribe now to get started and hit the bell so you never miss anything. Now, let's get growing. Sorry to be so negative right at the start of the video, but seriously, is there a more annoying pest at this time of year than aphids? Aphids are pretty easy to spot. They often come in large gangs and are pretty much every color of the rainbow. Now, larger plants can withstand a pretty significant aphid attack without too much of a difficulty. However, smaller plants, seedlings, those can be severely stunted and killed. Aphids attack the plant by sucking the juices, the sap, from it. And so you're often going to see distorted, curled leaves and stems, usually the new growth. You might also notice the leaves being very shiny. They're actually covered with a substance that the aphids produce called honeydew. Now, usually if you have aphids, you also have ants, at least a lot of times, because ants actually farm aphids. They love the honeydew, and they can actually milk the aphids by stroking them with their antenna, and then they produce that honeydew. So they want to take care of the aphids just as a farmer would want to take care of their cows, right? Because they want the milk. And so they're going to protect the aphids. They're also going to herd the aphids into the most juicy parts of the plant, which is usually the new growth. And that's why you're going to find them there. So it's kind of cool, if it wasn't happening in your garden, to your plants. So I have eight different ways to prevent and treat aphids. I'm going to start out with prevention. It's almost impossible to prevent aphid attack 100%. However, there are things you can do, including keeping your plants healthy and stress-free. Because almost instinctively, aphids and other insects know when a plant is weakened or stressed, and that's the one they're going to go after. So with most plants, the most stress comes from either a lack of water or not enough sun for whatever that plant needs. So my first of the eight tips is make sure the plants are growing in the right place, including moisture level and sun. Because that's going to go a long way to preventing stress, which is going to bring on the aphid attack. The second thing you want to do to prevent that is not overfeeding your plants. When there is an excess of nitrogen, primarily, you're going to get a lot of quick leafy growth, lush foliage that isn't typically the strongest. It's kind of weak and floppy because it grew so fast. You're typically not going to have that situation with an organic fertilizer, because they don't have the high concentration of nitrogen. So if you stick with organic fertilizers, you're probably okay. This is yet another reason to stay away from synthetic fertilizers, because too much of that green growth is going to attract the aphids. Now, like I said, it's almost impossible to prevent 100% aphid attack. However, we can steer them in a better direction with a trap crop. Now, picture a room, and there's two tables in this room. And one table has a plate full of broccoli, and the other table has a plate full of cookies. Let the kids into the room, and which table are they going to go to? Now, if they're a perfect child like Noah, they're going to go to the broccoli. Not. And it's the same with aphids. They're going to go to whatever plant they like best. And so if you can provide them a plate of cookies, so they stay away from your plate of broccoli, that's what you need to do. Nasturtiums are a great trap crop for aphids. I love nasturtiums because they grow quickly, they germinate easily, and you can plant them around about 15 to 20 feet away from whatever plants you're trying to keep the aphids off of. That way, they're going to go to the plate of cookies and leave the plate of broccoli for you. Although, I'd rather have the cookies. Something like nasturtiums is also easy to pull up and get rid of. If it's covered in aphids, pull it up and get rid of it. Don't put it in the compost, throw it away. You're taking that entire aphid population and removing it from your garden. Another great plant that attracts aphids is milkweed. Milkweed also attracts monarch butterflies and is a great habitat and food for them. So that's a twofer. Now, the aphids are going to infest the milkweed and make it look pretty ragged. However, milkweed is strong. It probably won't die, so it's still going to be there. So maybe just put it in a corner that you don't care about too much. It's going to attract the aphids over there, it's going to give you some monarch butterflies to boot, and it's a win-win. Number four is to plant alliums. Onions, chives, garlic. The smell of those plants actually repel aphids, and I think it's pretty interesting. I've got two beds out here in the backyard with alliums. I've got garlic and onions in one bed, and then some green onions in another bed. There's also nasturtiums in those beds, and those are the only beds that the nasturtiums have no aphids on them. Coincidence? Number five is to keep your eyes open. Visit your garden often because aphids are going to show up in few numbers first before they start to reproduce, and if you can get on top of the problem when it's small, it's a lot easier to fix than when it's big. So one of the crops that I always get aphids on are brassicas, especially brussels sprouts, and I've in fact never had a successful brussels sprout harvest because of aphids. Now, I haven't grown brussels sprouts in about three or four years, and I've learned a lot since then. This year, I think, is the first year I'm gonna actually get some brussels sprouts because it was going down the same road about a month, month and a half ago, and they were covered in gray aphids and black dirty honeydew, and so what I did was I took off about a third of the plant's leaves on the lower section where there was a lot of old aphid stuff and the new, of course, aphids were on the new top growth. So I took off all the leaves, got rid of them. Sorry, took off a third of the leaves, got rid of them, and then twice a day for about three or four days, I would go out with the hose and I would spray off with a hard jet, put your thumb over the nozzle or if you have an attachment, a hard jet of water to spray all of those aphids off, and most of them will fall off and drown. Some will return. That's why you got to do this a few days in a row. But, fingers crossed, I have not had a very many aphids on there since I did that and I think I'm gonna get some brussels sprouts this year. So it's hard to talk about aphids without talking about number seven, ladybugs or ladybirds depending on where you are. Have you ever seen packages of ladybugs in the store or online? Have you ever purchased some of those? Don't do it because for a couple reasons. Number one, most of them are wild harvested and you don't know where they're coming from and so up to 15% of ladybugs that you will bring into your garden in that way will have a parasite that will attack and kill or lower the reproduction rate of native ladybugs. Definitely don't want to do that. Not to mention, if you've ever brought ladybugs home to your garden and released them, did you see any the next day? Because most likely they flew away and there's a lot of different ways that people say you can keep them in your garden. It's pretty much impossible unless you physically trap them onto the plant with like a floating row cover or something. They're gonna fly away and even if they do stay, most of these ladybugs are harvested from the wild while they're hibernating and so you're just putting them on your plant to go to sleep. It's much better to attract native ladybugs to your garden through companion planting. Now, I did a whole video on companion planting for tomatoes and peppers. I'll link those down below and I was mentioning you want to plant flowers with humble blooms, humble shaped blooms, umbrella shaped blooms. So a lot of the the carrot family have these kind of flowers. Zinnias work. They love sunflowers. Lots of open pollen source for them and those kind of flowers attract other beneficials as well who eat aphids. Now, while we're talking about ladybugs, I've seen on in our Facebook group and I've had questions about this bug here and whether it's good or bad. This is just a baby ladybug. It's hard to tell because it looks nothing like them. But these are very very good bugs. In fact, ladybug larvae like this eat more aphids than the adult ladybugs do. Now, there are some other things that you can spray other than water to get rid of aphids. The only downside is sprays like this, even organic, can kill beneficial insects including ladybug larvae. So if you're going to spray, either one of these I'm going to tell you about, you want to make sure that you spot spray. Check the area. Spot spray. Don't spray your entire garden indiscriminately. If you have a problem in a specific spot, spray that spot. Also, spray in the early early morning or late in the evening when the bees have gone back to their hives or have not even woken up for the morning. In large amounts and if you spray directly on a bee, it can harm them. So the first spray is neem oil, which is completely organic and safe for humans and for most beneficial insects. It really does target insects that chew and eat and suck the sap out of leaves because the neem oil coats the leaf and when they bite the leaf, they take in some of that neem oil and it kills them. However, if it's sprayed directly on a soft-bodied beneficial insect like ladybug larvae, it can smother them. The next spray would be diatomaceous earth. Now, typically that's not known as a spray. It's a very fine powder. It's actually a bunch, millions and millions of microscopic prehistoric diatoms that were fossilized. If you feel the powder, it's actually very very soft, almost like baby powder. But if you look at it under a microscope, it's billions of pieces of shards of glass. That's what it looks like. And so for hard-shelled insects like roly-polies, for instance, it is going to get between the plates that they have and irritate them literally to death. And for soft-bodied insects like aphids, it's going to literally cut into their skin until it kills them. Sounds awful, I know, but it definitely works. You can sprinkle a dusting of the diatomaceous earth over your plants in the areas that the aphids are, but a lot of times sprinkling is not effective because it kind of comes in clumps and they can just avoid those clumps. And so what you can do is mix about a cup of diatomaceous earth into a gallon of water in a sprayer. Now it does not dissolve, it just suspends, and so as you're spraying you kind of want to keep it shaken up so it doesn't settle to the bottom. Spray over the affected areas of your plants and when it dries, it's not effective while it's wet, but when it dries, then it becomes effective. If you live in a rainy area and it's raining a lot and it's washing that off, you may have to do this every time it rains. And just a note on that, some people are more sensitive than others, so you might want to wear a mask or goggles because it does cause a lung and eye sensitivity in some people. But to ingest it, it's not harmful to humans in terms of poisonous. So those are eight suggestions to get rid of those awful little jerks that inhabit our gardens at this time of year and pretty much throughout the summer. But they're really coming on in full force now when a lot of that new growth is just happening. If you learned something, please give the video a thumbs up. It really helps the channel and pushes this video out to others who may need this information. Make sure you subscribe if you haven't and I'll see you next time.