My new favorite anti-aphid weapon

[TexasTycoon]

I wanted to wait a little bit to make sure this worked, but I can say definitively that I've found a successful treatment for aphids that got rid of them on both my lavender and basil plants which were infested by black and green aphids. The infestation wasn't super heavy, because I check my plants thoroughly daily and moved them both to quarantine away from the rest of the plant as soon as I noticed the aphids.

My new favorite insecticidal soap recipe:
-1 tablespoon vegetable or canola oil
-few drops of flea/tick shampoo for dogs (doesn't matter which brand as long as permethrin is an ingredient)
-few drops of peppermint oil
-quart of water
Mix all ingredients together in a large spray bottle (or scale up and use a pump sprayer if you have a lot of plants needing treatment).

How I used it:
Every evening I would go out with a spray bottle of plain water set to stream (I'm in an apartment and have no way to use a garden hose) and used it to blast any aphids I could see off of the plants, making sure to get underneath the leaves since that's where aphids love to hide. I'd let the plants dry for about 20 minutes or so and then spray the entire plant thoroughly with the insecticidal soap. I repeated this daily for about 4 or 5 days until I no longer saw any aphids on the plants. I kept them quarantined for a few more days after that and sprayed the insecticidal soap every other day or so as a precaution, in case there were aphids present I just wasn't seeing. My lavender and basil are now completely aphid-free and the plants are unharmed.

Some of you may remember that last year I had a horrible aphid infestation that completely decimated my two pepper plants. I tried store-bought insecticidal soap and it did nothing against them, and the plants died. This is the only thing I've tried that worked so effectively, so I wanted to share! Take my advice with a grain of salt - I am still a beginner to this after all - but I'm definitely going to continue to use this method for any future aphids I see.

[mdvpc]

Mine is green lacewings.

[TexasTycoon]

Originally Posted by mdvpc

Mine is green lacewings.

Hard to get any sort of beneficials to stick around on an apartment patio!

[b54red]

Right now I have an abundance of ladybugs and haven't seen any aphids yet. I hope the ladybugs will stay around a long time but experience leaves me to think they will somehow nearly disappear when it gets really hot. When they do I will use my soapy water, DE, and Permethin spray which doesn't require spraying very often because of the lingering killing done by the DE.

Bill

[maxjohnson]

My formula is 1tsp of each: cold pressed neem oil, karanja oil, and peppermint soap. Very effective. But it's the ants that farm the aphids so I work more on getting rid of ants, mainly using diatomaceous earth on their nest, but I don't know if it actually kill them or just make them move to another location.

[Scooty]

Originally Posted by b54red

Right now I have an abundance of ladybugs and haven't seen any aphids yet. I hope the ladybugs will stay around a long time but experience leaves me to think they will somehow nearly disappear when it gets really hot. When they do I will use my soapy water, DE, and Permethin spray which doesn't require spraying very often because of the lingering killing done by the DE.

Bill

I would suspect that lingering is more permethrin than DE. Stuff is pretty powerful.

I hope anyone with cats and using permethrin is doing so very carefully....

[luigiwu]

Originally Posted by maxjohnson

My formula is 1tsp of each: cold pressed neem oil, karanja oil, and peppermint soap.

My google tells me karanja is a cousin of neem. Why both then and where do you get karanja oil?