ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – From aphids to spittle bugs, there are annoying to destructive pests in many of our gardens.
For aphids, the best chance of beating them is to monitor often and early.
“If you can catch an aphid problem while it’s small, it’s way easier to deal with than once it’s gotten big and you’re trying to roll that back,” said Alex Wenninger, Entomologist and Integrated Pest Management Technician with the UAF Cooperative Extension Service.
“So if you monitor often, you know, every couple of days, at least a couple times a week throughout the summer, just take a quick check of your plants. While it’s early like that, you can just take a damp cloth and wipe them off. You could use a spray of the hose to kind of wash them off the plants.
“Once those aphids start to get, you know, a little bit more populous, you might want to start removing leaves that those aphids have started to, like, really colonize heavily, and especially if you have any leaves on the plant that are already starting to droop, they’ve been fed on quite a bit. Definitely remove those and dispose of them in the trash.”
And she says, ladybugs, or more correctly, lady beetles, should not be used to combat aphids.
“I know people mean really well when they do buy those ladybugs because they don’t want to use a pesticide in their garden. They want to use something that’s natural. And so lady beetles they’re cute, they’re charismatic. We think that’s great and their heart is in the right place,” Wenninger said. “But those lady beetles that you can buy at the garden stores, they’re wild, collected up from the mountains in California. They don’t go through any kind of testing. They carry and transmit diseases to native lady beetles, unfortunately.”
Wenninger also says that if the problem gets big, you can still wash them away with water or use a pesticide product.
“With pesticides I always give the disclaimer that they need to follow all label directions,” Wenninger said.
She also says people are welcome to the Cooperative Extension for advice since “it can be tricky for folks to pick on that is suitable for their situation.”
She also recommends that people avoid over-fertilizing if they have aphid problems.
“Plants that put out a lot of new tissue quickly can attract aphid issues as they like that new, soft tissue,” said Alex.
Another common pest is sawflies, or actually the larvae of sawflies.
“A lot of people mistake them for caterpillars because they do look kind of caterpillar-like, but technically, caterpillars would be larvae of moths and butterflies. And these guys technically are larvae of wasps, not the stinging kind of wasps — plant feeding wasps,” Wenninger said.
Again, monitoring is key. They favor gooseberries and currants.
“We have a species that’s not native to Alaska. It was accidentally brought in with those ornamental plants. Because of that, it doesn’t have natural predators here. And so they have a tendency to kind of get a little bit out of hand,” Wenninger said.
She says they start laying eggs as early as late May. If you get larvae, pluck those leaves off and toss them out into the yard.
“They have a hard time making it back to the plant,” Wenninger said.
On the less destructive scale but still annoying are spittlebugs. They create a foam that looks like soap bubbles.
“They’re an itty-bitty little sap sucking insect, and it’s the nymphs that live inside of that. That foam is sort of like protection from predators for them,” Wenninger said.
“They don’t cause that much damage. I could see a case where maybe if you had a ton of them, they could potentially cause some damage, but we don’t really see them make big populations. You can rinse them off with a hose, but a lot of times what happens is you might rinse off the foam and then the little itty-bitty critter is still there.”
Contact the UAF Cooperative Extension Service for more information. For specific questions about pests or pesticides, click here.
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