Here’s a practical, organic, hands on approach to getting rid of aphids. Specifically targeting the oleander aphid - Aphis nerii, the methods used in this video will also help remove all types of aphids from other plants in the garden.
I absolutely love my milkweed plants. They’re a huge pollinator magnet and are truly, uniquely beautiful. When growing milkweeds to attract in the monarch butterfly, the last thing that you ever want to see on your plants, are aphids. Even though aphids do not eat monarch eggs, they easily suck the life out of your Asclepias plants, damaging them greatly, stunting growth and leaving not much left behind to eat for our caterpillars. In some cases they can kill milkweeds, if the infestation is dense enough.
Bright yellow with black legs, oleander aphids are parthenogenic, meaning they clone themselves to reproduce. Unfazed, they don’t need to go out on dates to find a male mate. In the wild, all reproduction for this species occurs without fertilization. The baby clones- nymphs, go through 5 quick growing stages and are themselves able to reproduce within a week.
Colonies grow quickly as each aphid lives for 25 days and usually produces up to 80 nymphs. As time moves and the temperatures heat up during the summer, if conditions on a plant become over crowded, or the plant has being sucked dry, adult aphids have the ability to grow wings, allowing them to migrate to a tastier, less crowded host plant. This incredible super power, makes the sap sucking colony, all the more harder to control without planned, timely efforts.
After 4 weeks of trial and error, through using different methods to kill the aphids, the most successful method was to squish the aphids between my fingers, wearing a latex glove.
Other methods used include; spraying the plant with soapy water, hosing it down with jets of water, cutting infested parts off the plants and/or sometimes removing the plant altogether, and dusting my plants with diatomaceous earth.
Before making this video, I double checked my plants for both monarch eggs and caterpillars. Avoid using neem oil, soap or diatomaceous earth, on your plants if you have monarch eggs or caterpillars present. Neem oil is best to be avoided at all times. It does more harm than good to our precious pollinators. I do not recommend assisted biological control such as buying and dispersing lady bugs onto your plants to eat the aphids, as they will eat the monarch eggs and caterpillars as well.

свернуть