Garden Journal April 20: APHIDS!

BAD NEWS! I’ve been dealing with APHIDS for the past week. 

(image source)

My poor plants were severely under stress for the past 2-3 weeks and I am saddened that I did not reckon it until a week ago.

Remember the previous post where I posted the picture of the eggs? Well, I realized those were aphids a few days ago. One morning I got up and looked at my seedlings and found some holes in my young spicy chilli plant (the overachieving one) and I thought to myself, “Hmm well aren’t those ants amazing, they have started eating leaves.”

The moment I walked out the door, I realized I had an aphid infestation problem. I don’t know how I realized, but I’m glad I did, because I was right. Everything instantly made sense:

• The appearance of many ants around my seedlings was because they were harvesting the dew excreted by the aphids


• The hundreds of eggs laid beneath the leaves were left by the aphids


• The tiny black specks underneath my seedling leaves were aphids


• My tomato seedling leaves were starting to curl up as if they were ‘drying up’, and the plants remained small with stunted growth. That’s because the aphids were feeding on their sap and caused them to stop growing!


• My bakchoi seedling leaves were starting to turn yellow! That’s because the damned aphids were feeding on my plants


• My cabbage seedlings have gone from strong to shriveled, and I had to pull out one seedling completely because the leaves had aphids and their eggs all over 

For the past few days I’ve been searching around for home-made spray to kill the aphids. I had come across a few options but in the end, I reluctantly decided to go with an organic natural insecticide RTU Zarachtin by local firm Zagro Asia, which used neem vegetable oil as its base component. First I turned the plants over and washed all the undersides of the leaves with water, and got rid of all the leaves that had little black specks or little white eggs. Two days later, I then started spraying them with the bottle I had purchased.

I was really dead set against chemical insecticides and therefore I settled on a natural oil-based one. Some home-made insecticides require drops of washing detergent which made me unsure of whether I wanted to do that.

Well, we’ll see how it goes. I’ve sprayed them, and will observe my plants closely for the next 10 days.