How I Ended Up in the Bath with my Plants
July 19, 2009
After careful humming and hawing over insecticides, we decided to take the nobler course of action and bathe the insects off our plants. Here they are queueing for the bathroom:
A few days ago I noticed that some of the indoor plants (chili, basil and oregano) had discolouration on the leaves:
After putting this out to the crowds on Twitter, I got a number of helpful replies. In particular, allotments.ie pointed me towards an article on their site about the red spider mite. These sub-millimetre creatures seemed similar to ones on the underside of the leaves of my plants when I checked, though admittedly between mediocre eyesight and shaky hands it’s hard to see anything on that scale.
There seemed to be three options:
- Unleash a predator, namely phytoseiulus persimilis.
- Do a regular plant wash using an oil, fatty acid or simply water.
- Use an insecticide. Things containing bifenthrin seem to be popular.
Option 1, while exciting and fun, seemed sadly logistically troublesome. I really felt like option 3 when I found out about the infestation, but since I have calmed down, maybe I’ll keep it as a last resort. This leaves option 2:
The Shibazguyz also backed up option 2, recommending that I could wash off the guests using “a strong tap or shower”. How permanent a solution this is remains to be seen. Early checks suggest that I may not have got them all, though it’s hard to tell when they are still wet. The basil plants seemed to be the worst infested so we decided to bin them altogether.
And so that’s how I ended up spending the evening giving my plants a shower in the bath. Ridiculous carry on altogether, but sure at least I can say I tried.
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Hey cheese, thanks for the mention.
Hope this works out for you.
Another option, but best with a small plant….. it can be plunged foliage only into a bucket of soapy water to sort out many pests.
Tie a plastic bag around the compost filled pot and hold on tight to prevent spillage.
Sounds like a good idea James. Is there a chance there may be pests still in the soil that would just come back?
It seems such a shame to have to bin the plants after getting them through most of the summer.They look quite healthy and green in the bathroom queue!Would having them all in close proximity have anything to do with all of the plants getting infested.
Peggy – I only binned the two basil plants, and kept the rest. The basils were pretty badly effected so the thought of eating the discoloured leaves didn’t seem too appetising!
The plants were close together alright, but unfortunately in our small apartment we don’t have the space to keep many things far away from other things!
[...] up was soapy water. I tried spraying, showering and bathing, with mixed success. Well it failed really – even dunking the whole plants in a bath of soapy [...]
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