In our plant hobby, pests always come hand in hand whether we like it or not. In this video I share

Hi guys, my name is Sean. I'm a houseplant enthusiast from Jakarta, Indonesia. Welcome to today's video where I'm going to be sharing with you the basics of pests. The first thing that you need to know about pests is that every plant will definitely have pests. When you have plants in your home it's only a matter of time and the different species of pests depends on the species of plants that you have. Some pests are naturally drawn to specific species of plants which we may get into later. But I don't know any houseplant parents that don't have pests in their house plants or in their garden because that is just something that we cannot avoid. So we have to learn to live with them. It's actually quite therapeutic if you learn how to control them and if you gain some confidence. It takes maybe killing a few plants and of course killing a lot of pests for you guys to know you know what measures work for you guys, what ways of control works the best. But there are actually three basic components and I will talk about two of them later with visuals of course. Number one would be chemicals and this is the most commonly used and chemical pesticides are actually quite harmful for everybody including the people living in the area. So you know if you have pets or kids of course that's not really good and when you have chemical pesticides the water or whatever will leach into the ground and it will affect the ecosystem as well. Just keep that in mind. I'm not going to poopoo anyone that uses chemical pesticides because I know I do. So that is just a perfectly normal thing and the one thing that I would say maybe is to keep your plants in smaller tight pots so that you don't have a lot of soil where a lot of the pesticides are just going to be wasted. So that's one of the tips for that. And the second way of pest control would be natural means and the only one that I can think of is neem oil. So that is an oil derived from the plant which is the neem plant and you just dilute it with water. Of course I'm going to show you later how I do it and it really works. You can either spray down the foliage with the neem oil solution or you can just water the plant, drench it because the neem oil will be absorbed by the roots into the leaves and any pests that are feeding on the roots and the leaves of the plants or living in the soil they will die. And neem oil basically alters their hormones and I'm not really sure the science behind it but it causes them to die pretty painfully and slowly. But keep in mind with both the chemical and neem oil or natural means rather way of pest control they only kill the sort of the larvae and adult stage and they don't really kill the egg stage because you have to consider that every pest has a life cycle usually it's about 14 days. So if you have killed the larvae and adults you may have more babies that hatch in about a week or two weeks time. So just keep that in mind so you may have to repeat treatment often. The last way that you can control them and unfortunately that is not available here in my region would be biological control and I know that that is a big thing if you're living in the west where you're getting predatory insects that will feed on your pests you just release them you bite them you release them and then they will just do their own thing. Of course in Indonesia I think that would be a little bit of a controversy because a lot of people here are very disgusted by pests. In fact a lot of plant parents here don't even touch a potting mix with their own hands. I don't know why I think Indonesians in general maybe it's the culture we're a little bit cleaner or more mindful so any little bugs that we see in the potting mix people will just squeal and scream but for me I have to be honest with you in the beginning I was a little squeamish about seeing worms and bugs but things got better as I became a more experienced plant parent so now I just deal with that I just take nearly bugs right off the plant I just squish them no problem because they're a natural part of our ecosystem and they don't harm us these pests are not dirty they're not disgusting they don't cause us disease or any harm so I don't mind dealing with them but that's from me experiencing a lot of plant care and experience but generally speaking biological control is the best way that you can control your pest population and I'm not going to get into that in this episode because I'm not experienced but there are a lot of YouTubers that will talk about that so feel free to check those out if it's available in your region and or if you are living here in Indonesia or if you're living abroad you have a past biological pest control business or you have an idea talk to me I would really love to be a partner somehow I would love to be a platform to advocate for that or maybe even become a business partner or an investor in that sense because we do need that option I think there's quite a lot of new plant parents here in Indonesia and I'm sure some of us are open-minded to releasing ladybugs and lacewings around our collections and letting them help us take care of our pests so the next thing that I want to talk about would be the type of pests right so I don't really know a lot about insect science but generally speaking I believe there are different species like the mites their aphids and I believe the scale could be in the aphids family but I could be wrong but you actually need to know what species they are because different kinds of biological control different types of pesticides generally speaking they do affect different types of pests however I would say that a lot of the pest control that I use here whether it's the chemical furodun or curacron which I use and gonna talk about that later in this video or if or neem oil all of these affect all the different species of pests that are common to our hospital so generally the pesticides that I'm going to show you at the end of this video is going to be great for all of these general varieties of pests so here's some of the common pests and little bit of their attributes that I have dealt with and a lot of you guys have PM me about number one mealy bugs so they're usually this white fuzzy bugs they move very slowly and they're usually brought there by ants because they can't really move that well so if you see ants around your plants usually there's mealy bugs either on the leaves or in the roots I have a video on the mealy bugs which I'm gonna link up above so if you want to see that but mealy bugs are actually quite easy you can spray them down you can pick them off with your hands however the difficult mealy bugs are the ones that you see inside the roots so those are the ones that we cannot see but if you see that your plants are growing slowly or if there are ants crawling around the plant but you don't see any extra floral nectaries you know that there's definitely mealy bugs in the soil oh and another thing about mealy bugs is that they actually love they love cacti and succulents live here in my climate so they're naturally drawn to those and usually they're also found in the new leaves so yeah that's how you find them mealy bugs are not that hard because you can spot them quite easily so this is a very stress-free pest to to have around I guess and the next one would be spider mites and this is actually quite dangerous and harmful because they can decimate your plant very quickly they actually kill the plants rather quickly while the other pests may actually be more salvageable if you know what I mean so spider mites you can see from the leaves you see tiny specks of like bite marks and that's when you know that the spider mites are there or if the plant is in decline suddenly like very quickly check the back of the leaves usually spider mites congregate at the back of the leaves they're usually these tiny tiny specks I'm gonna deal with one of them later now with an alocasia later in this video so you're gonna see that but they're tiny tiny specks of mites and they do have this webbing which is why they're called the spider mites but they're not spiders by any means so yeah one way to find out is to check out the leaf surface for those tiny spots and also if you have alocasia because those are spider mites best friends or if you have heart-shaped that is also their favorite food so if you have alocasia 100% you will get spider mites and spider mites actually do well mostly indoors so if you have your plants growing outdoors it is less likely for you to have spider mites but of course you can still have them so check your alocasia often check your plants often if you see those crazy dots if you see something declining very quickly check the back of the leaves because you will spot them the next one would be scale and those are armored pests they don't really move much as well and they also have a symbiotic relationship with ants because they do feed on plants and usually scale like slow growing plants like your ficus and your sansevierias or dracaenas and they will eat the plant material and then they will poop out the sugary material which the ants would feed on so ants would actually put those scale up there and they would harvest their eggs and take care of their young so they do have that symbiotic relationship in that sense scale is a little bit hard when they are a little bit younger or new you can actually just gently wipe them off or even lightly use your fingernails to take them off but if they have been on the plant for too long it is almost impossible to get them off they have this armor that is very difficult to penetrate which is why they're called scale and scale you can also treat them the same way with neem oil or with the sprays that i'm going to discuss later but you can also kill them with a little bit of alcohol i hear that alcohol when you dab them onto the leaf where the scale is sitting or the stem they will cause the armor to explode exposing the delicate inside of the animal and killing it so and one last thing would be soapy water i hear that soapy water also causes the armor a lot of damage so they will really really succumb to that so with scale alcohol soap and neem oil also works and also your chemical means and the next one will be fungus gnats i have a video on that so do click on the link above if you want to see my fungus gnats video generally speaking i've tried many things there are many many tips online because it is one of the most discussed not discussed but discussed discussed passed online because it affects so many of us they are these little flying things and we think of them as mosquitoes so when asians talk about plants and mosquitoes around plants they're actually really talking about fungus gnats because mosquitoes don't have any business around our plants it's fungus gnats that do fungus gnats don't really affect us except that they do fly into our noses and ears sometimes because they're always looking for dark and moist places to layer the eggs so fungus gnats is a sign that you're over watering your plants because they actually live on the top i don't know two to three centimeters of your soil they cannot live much further than that and they do need fungus to thrive their babies fit on fungus and fungus thrives when you have really damp organic potting mix and one way they can eliminate fungus gnats is those means that we're going to discuss later with the neem oil or the chemical means but you can also put diatomaceous earth which is this powder which is made of these fossilized remains of i'm not going to get into that but that diatomaceous earth actually causes some damage you do want to sprinkle it on the top of the dry soil because when you have wet diatomaceous earth it renders it useless so what happens is that when fungus gnats are crawling over these white powdery substance they're like glass to them they'll cut up their bodies so they will be in a lot of pain they will not live in contact with the diatomaceous earth which is why people spread them on the top of the potting mix i've actually seen them like kind of go up through the surface of the potting mix and just they just get so hard they were just like be writhing and and stuff like that i actually witnessed that with my own eyes i wish i filmed that that i did not and the diatomaceous earth actually is a very inefficient way of eliminating fungus gnats only because again you cannot get the the powder wet at all like the next time you water your plants you may have to reapply the diatomaceous earth on it and also it causes a lot of the powdery substance to be all over your space it's not attractive at all so if with fungus gnats the best way to deal with it is number one back off with watering let the top soil dry out completely for longer for a longer period of time that you are comfortable with because generally speaking plants can survive plants can experience a little bit of drought and keep in mind because they do live on the top portion of the soil bottom watering them would be the best way so when you bottom water your plants you just basically take a pot and you just put it in water a little bit of water and then you would just let the water and then sorry you would just let the potting mix suck up a little bit of water ups and then you would remove it so then you have a dry top layer of the potting mix where the fungus gnats cannot even find because again they're looking for these damp humid places to dive into and to lay eggs so with no dry surface you have no fungus gnats and the larvae and eggs cannot survive in dry topsoil so yeah sorry for more details obviously again go to that fungus gnats video because i find that it's definitely one of the most helpful videos out there if i may say so myself bottom water your plants let them dry out for fungus gnats and you don't really have fungus gnats issues when you have them outdoors somehow a lot of the predators do come in and control the population really well and there are other pests which we're not going to talk about here like your snails grasshoppers and things like that they do bite into the leaves really in a big way like they would take a whole chunk out of your leaf overnight but that's another video for another time i haven't really figured out how to deal with them except i'll just get more plants because the more plants you have the less likely they're going to be damaged i need to outcompete their population by having more leaves and i don't really mind it when they feed on my plants because this is their home too right so we have to be mindful that these pests they're just trying to find their place in this world just like we are they're trying to survive and this world this world rightfully belong to theirs as much as it does to ours and when plants get eaten up when leaves get eaten up i mean it'll grow back you know if you have active nodes if you watch my propagation videos you can propagate single nodes you get many more plants so be forgiving be mindful and just accept the fact that they're going to be passed around and i'm going to show you real quickly the the pest control videos after this but just keep in mind when you do these pest controls you can treat them as a part of your plant care routine you know do it every month every three months depending on how big your collection is or how much time you have put on some good music believe me it really helps when you have good music on and you can just spend half a day just go through your plants check them and treat them for pests and once you have dealt with the pest the next time you see those pests come back whether it's the same species or different species you have less anxiety you'll be like ah i know how to deal with that you know it's super easy and what i'm going to show you later actually it looks a little bit complicated and all that but when you get down to it it literally takes like 15 minutes to do to get it done so do it deal with your pest accept them know that you will have them and yeah just be a good plant parent i mean your plant will thank you for it they will bounce back very quickly as i show will show you later in this video that the plants will appreciate it when you do treat them for pests welcome to today's video where i'm going to be sharing you the different ways that i control pests and also eliminate them namely there's actually two ways to get rid of them one is by a neem oil spray that i'm going to show you in a bit step by step i also do use a foradun and that's actually very controversial we're going to get into that later as well i guess the first thing we need to talk about is how do we identify pests there are a few visual cues and number one the most obvious one is that the plant may just be in decline it may look like it's suffering and then it may also be stunted as in it would not grow for a while that's also a very good way to see it sometimes you can see the pest visually as well like your mealy bugs are very easy to spot and spider mites are a little bit more difficult but then you can also spot on the leaves the damage that cause that are caused by spider mites even though spider mites live on the underside of the leaves but they can cause some damage on the leaves that you can you can identify very easily with experience and one really cool way to identify pests would be to follow the ants so if you have a lot of ants running around in the plant and it is not caused by extra floral nectaries which i show a lot in my channel floral nectaries is these spots on the leaves that a lot of philodendrons have so the philodendron actually produces sweet nectar out of the leaves and not the flower to attract the ants so then the ants will feed on these nectars and in exchange the ants will protect the plant from pests all right so this coca loba tree actually lives over there on that pot indoors it gets excellent light but the problem with plants when you keep them indoors is that they don't have any predators so then their population would be unchecked and they will explode and grow so that's a little bit of a the mealybugs so what i did was that i saw a lot of ants here for a long time you see the ants are congregating here and it's feeding on the mealybugs poop i don't know if the camera is going to focus yeah let me bring it over yeah see they're all hanging out here and one of the reasons why they're all hanging on this particular branch is because i took this plant out about a week ago and i procrastinated i should have been filming back then but i didn't so what i did was i actually just sprayed the whole plant down with a jet stream of water wherever possible wherever i see usually on the new growths here on the edge you would see just follow the ants and you will find them and that's the scale as well and some of the scale here can be peeled off easily by fingernails and some cannot and here's the thing i actually knocked a lot of them out already and look at that within about a week time all the growth point is activated all of them are alive look at that that's a new leaf how cute is that look at the shiny i love the cocoa tree and the variegated one is actually on my wish list and i hope i can get my hands on it but that's scale look at that yeah our mealybugs i'm not sure there's both of them in this plant so yeah this plant was suffering i did not treat it yet disclaimer i just basically again hold it down and when i hold it down i can see that the scale and the mealybugs are actually knocked off the leaves so i would say that the number one defense that you should do is knock your pest with the jet stream of water whether you're in the shower or if you have a hose mealybugs spider mites and scale is a little bit harder because scale do attach themselves quite well onto the plants they're a little bit more difficult that's why we're going to go ahead with today's treatment all right so the first thing that we're going to do is create a neem oil solution i'm going to show you how i do it and this is very very important and did this work against all types of pests whether it's aphids or mites they work really well so what i did was actually i used some of my soap here this is my insecticidal bar soap i just took a piece of scissors and i took a few pieces out and as you can see the few pieces are comfortably laying in there also alternately you can use a little bit of dish liquids this is or by plants so i'm guessing it's good for plants maybe but yeah i just put a few drops of dishwashing liquid i never ever ever ever measure anything so do not ask me for measurements because i'm just not that kind of person so i have this in a two milliliter sprayer here which i prepared and i'm just going to pour some neem oil here and let me show you how much i actually pour i always eyeball it like that that's actually a little bit too much but oh well that's okay if it's too much i'll show you how i can deal with this later because there's ways to handle that and what i do is normally just mix it with water and then i will i will mix it in this bottle before pouring into here so i can actually control the amount so because i pour too much oil here i may actually do two batches here which means that this will have enough to fill in two of these i don't know if i'll show you what they mean later but i want to show you another thing that's optional this is curacron and this is actually chemical while that is actually natural so i'm going to talk about neem oil in another episode because there's a lot of things to talk about but this is actually a little bit better for the environment and for your skin and all that and curacron is actually very very very toxic and when you deal with this you're supposed to wear gloves and i'm not gonna wear gloves i'm sorry because i'm filming so i need two hands but you should wear gloves and goggles with curacron you do not want to get this in your eye you will get blinded so this is optional you can just go with this and leave it alone if you want to go all natural but for me because i'm doing this tutorial and i only use this for very very severely pest infested plants i mix two i mix both natural which is the neem oil and also the curacron i probably am going to only add about 20 drops or so and that's done so then next thing i want to do is add some water and it's already smelling really bad here and i don't want to fill it all the way to the top because let me show you what i'm going to do sorry i'm doing this with one hand this is so difficult i'm going to be shaking this so this is why i have this in this bottle instead of having it directly here which i already filled in with a little bit of water so my pest treatment is always easy i don't measure anything and i'm so sorry if you're the kind of person that measures follow the instruction follow it will say or ask the seller how do how much ratio to put in because i'm not going to go into that so don't follow me and i'm going to pour about half of these because we said that there were too many oils before i'd rather have a diluted but more frequent treatment than having a very heavy treatment for my pest because if you have too heavy of a treatment you don't dilute it enough this will burn the leaves and neem oil can also burn the leaves and think about neem oil please please please use it during sundown this is 5 15 p.m right now so it is sundown because neem oil is photosensitive and we're going to get into that in another episode and you don't want to apply this in daytime basically never ever apply neem oil when the sun is up all right so i'm going to be closing this and now we're going to bring this over to the bad boy over there and we're going to spray it down i'm just going to quickly show you how i do it i'm not going to show you how i spray this down because i do need both hands to do it but the things that when you spray them down look at that die die when you do it you make sure that you get both the underside and the top side of the leaves so i may have to use two of these because this is a pretty big plant and i do want to give this a very thorough rinse today oh and before i let you go again i mentioned this before but i want to stress this one more time this plant did not put out leaves for about six months because i guess it was infested by the pests and as you can see everything is growing everything is every possible branch is putting out a growth point so pest control definitely you must do it it's a must check your pet check your plants check them for pests and treat them it's not stressful it's not difficult it is part of a plant care it's very normal and everyone has it there's nothing to be embarrassed so yeah good luck okay hang on so i forgot one really important point um and that this is leftover that we had before i'm just going to put it in my watering can here with water in it and i'm just going to water that plant with it so what happens is that this neem oil actually you can it's called the neem oil soil drench can be absorbed by the roots and then the neem oil the essential oils will be taken up to the leaves so when the pests feed on the leaves they will die so this is another way to deliver neem oil into the plants and into the bellies of the pests it is actually one week later and all the leaves that were red and tiny before has hardened and they've become mature sized leaves which is very interesting very cute that's a near growth point there and i can see that some of the baby leaves are also growing out of it so i really don't mind pests and look at this growth point here this is so cute so i really don't mind pests at all because pests really if you treat it the plant will bounce back rather quickly so i'm really excited whenever i see pests and i treat it all right so the next pest control measure that i use is actually the carbofuran this is not the bottle it came with this is from a juice but i'm going to insert a picture of what the packaging looks like it comes in under many brands but the one that i have is branded under furadan and it's basically these purple granules i believe they are called sparkle g as well somewhere else i'm not sure they're the same thing i just heard people commenting on this but the reason why i want to show this i want i want to be completely honest with you is that this is a very strong pesticide in fact i want to go as far as saying this is a biocide it kills every living thing except plants of course it kills a lot of the beneficial pests and also the animals that are feeding on these pests like your birds so this is really bad for the ecosystem and it's also full of chemicals which is really toxic for us if you have this leach into our water system and we ended up drinking this by accident this is really toxic for us this is not good stuff but a lot of people do use it even agriculturally they do use it but again it's banned in many developed nations and yeah i do use this to some degree and what happens is that when you i use this on the plants this is why i keep my plants in small pots where possible so i don't have to use a lot of this stuff i want to be very mindful about using this i just want to sprinkle it on the top of the soil kind of like this i don't measure anything again i'm not a measure but this is a rather big pot so i'm going to use a little bit more of course on small pots i only want to use a little bit so what happens in here is that whenever we water the the plant the water would dissolve some of this and it will leak into the soil and then the plant will take it up through the roots the plant will take up the chemicals and then it will distribute it to the leaves and any pests that are feeding on the stem or on the leaves or on the roots of the plant will die from this so this is very potent stuff again and i do use this very mindfully i don't use i try to avoid this where possible but in this case this is pretty severe so i do use this and in some of my more expensive propagated plants i do use it as well so in today's video i've showed you basically two ways one is the neem oil which is a natural way of doing things but again neem oil is also banned in certain countries just so you know it's banned in the uk as far as i know and then there's a chemical means which is this fluorodon and of course there's another one which we used earlier coracron which is which i do mix with my neem oil in this kind of extreme cases but generally speaking i just use neem oil so it's really up to you what method you choose and in fact in your local area the regulations may be different and what the kinds of pest control measures are going to be different but do check with your plant stores or your garden supply stores see what they recommend but both the fluorodon here and the neem oil that i showed you earlier is very good for all sorts of pests meaning all species like your aphids your mites and things like that so i also do have a soap that i created for plants and it's got insecticidal properties and i'm gonna link that video up above because there's a whole new video on its own and it's not available in your country most likely if you don't live in indonesia because i can't ship them without an export permit so only indonesians can get those soaps unfortunately and people have been having really good success with it so basically we just it's a bar soap of course it's plastic free delivery so you would leather up the soap and then you would take the foam and just clean the leaves with it so any pests that are in contact with it because it contains neem and coconut oil any pests will also die from being in contact with that soap so that's really good stuff and again do check out that video if you have the chance so yeah this is basically how i control all my pest issues i don't really do anything else and i really don't mind having pests around because they're part of the ecosystem they're definitely challenging but then if you get used to it it's not a problem so here's an alacasia and they are spider mites favorite food look at all these colony of spider mites and if you can see them well they're just moving around so there are these teeny tiny dots that move around look at it it's like a floating highway how cute usually they live on the underside of the leaves as you can see here there's so many of them look at how that's really pretty it looks like the galaxy but they usually live on the underside of the leaves and i don't want to contaminate myself after i touch this leaf i definitely have to wash my hands because i may get some eggs and larvae on me look at that there's so many of them and one of the biggest sign of them on your plants is these uh what do you call it these bite marks usually around the on the leaf there are these little dots so that's the first sign but first of all if you have an alacasia look at this one this is a new leaf and it's already getting contaminated so i actually do need to treat the plants around where this plant used to be i like in one area i need to treat all of them with spider mites because they do spread rather fast usually they are also more prolific indoors because there's no biological control there's no predators outdoors actually it's very rare to get them my dad actually just bought this plant so it was probably already infested when he got it but usually when they're living outside the spiders and other types of predatory bugs do feed on these mites so the population would usually be kept in check but in this case this has gone way too far so i'm going to be treating this first of all i'm going to be hosing it down if you're living indoors you can also use the shower shower nozzles and don't forget also the patio because they they can live on the patio as well the lower stem here okay so now when you look at the leaf it's pretty clean i don't see any more of those buggers but then the damage is done and you will not get healthy leaves back usually i would say if the leaf is way too damaged i would say cut it off but because we're doing a demonstration on this leaf and also because i feel like this leaf is still photosynthesizing it's still more than half healthy i usually cut leaves off when they're 50 damage on the leaves so this is doing okay i did spray this down as well so i'm gonna leave this on i'm not gonna cut it but in your case i would advise you to probably cut it off like right down here and then the new leaf for the alacasia because this is the secondary leaf the newest one the new leaf will come from this here all right so in my hand here i have the plant soap that i make and stop asking me if i can ship it to your country because i can't so this is only available for indonesians it's on my tokopedia page at seven stages and if you want to make your own or commission someone in your area to make this soap i do have the details i don't have the exact recipe but i have the ingredients listed any soap maker would know how to make this so this is formulated especially specifically for soap for for plants and this is for insecticidal purposes it's made with coconut oil it's got neem oil peppermint and activated charcoal in it that's why it's black in color so this is all natural and i don't use any plastic for delivery there's no synthetics there's no fragrance so this is perfect for plants that are troubled like in this case i'm going to soap this down any eggs and larvae would be easily washed off with this and technically speaking i do want to repeat this after about a week's time because i do want to break the life cycle of the spider mites as you can see the infestation just now was really really really bad so yeah this is one way to do it i don't know if you have any insecticidal soaps in your region do look it up you'll be surprised by some of the options that you may have in your area to use so there's that i'm gonna rinse this off i forgot to turn this on again if you don't have this you can use any kind of insecticidal spray you can use neem oil chemicals there's so many things in your area so do check with your plant store or garden store or other plant hobbies to find out what they're using for pest control all alocasias will have spider mites and that's just the fact of of having being a plant parent you're just gonna have to deal with this thing and if you let it become a habit it becomes pretty enjoyable if you can't tell i'm actually having a blast right now no pun intended all right so i hope that that's helpful for you guys i'm at botanist on instagram if you want to DM me any questions regarding plant care and propagations i'll try my best to get back to you meanwhile do take care and stay safe i will see you in the next video bye