Houseplant 101: Control Houseplant Pests: Thrips, Mealybugs, Spider Mites, Aphids, & More! — Ep 123

today we're going to talk about house plant pests those annoying bugs that affect some of our beautiful house plants so we'll go over specific types how to prevent them and what to do about it when we actually get them on our plants [Music] so I lived a blissful six years without plant pests in my home and a number people have asked in the early years what I was doing about bugs and insects and I had no idea what they were talking about until I started to grow food indoors and I started to grow pineapples and microgreens and a lot more herbs and potatoes and word to the wise don't grow potatoes indoors that attracted so many different types of pestiferous insects under the Sun and different types of arthropods too because I had spider mites I had thrips I had white flies which I had never seen before I also had mealy bugs mealy bugs were coming out of my ears or in the cases of the potatoes their eyes because I literally had potatoes not even ones I was growing but one sitting on my on my kitchen countertop that I didn't eat and you know how they grow those little green eyes then I had actual mealy bugs growing out of there so they weren't even on my plants they were just growing off of the potatoes so these insects seem to just spontaneously arrive out of nowhere and I know a number of you had those queries like where do these things even come from plants communicate in very different ways and when they are stressed they communicate in a different way than maybe we do so I'm conversing with you right now or I'm at least talking to you and that's a different way that we communicate but plants communicate usually by their chemistry so things that we don't often see they will have some volatile chemicals that might be coming off of their leaves or their stems and if that is a sign of stress sometimes you get pestiferous insects that are attracted to that maybe they come in off a breeze maybe they're already previously in the soil maybe they they had eggs on the leaves that you didn't see when you're picking up at the garden center and then they just start to proliferate and because a lot of these pestiferous insects are able to breed and they don't often need a male or female partner in order to be able to produce young which is kind of crazy they just start to proliferate under our nose without us even seeing it and pretty soon we had zero and then all of a sudden we have hundreds of mealy bugs that we have to deal with or some other kind of pest oftentimes these are the different ways that we get bugs into our home and of course if you're keeping that plant healthy which we'll get into then that is a more proactive preventative way of preventing pestiferous insects in your home now if we were outdoors and a plant was stressed and these pests AFER's insects were chomping on the plant and were attracted by the chemical signals that were coming through the air oftentimes the plant will give off another chemical signal and get beneficial insects on board and so those beneficial insects would then prey upon those bad bugs or those pestiferous insects so I think that there's so much beauty to nature and creating these kinds of ecosystems in our home can allow us the opportunity to deal with predatory or posta fruss insects as well so one of the things that I would like to talk about is just this question that I got from a number of my subscribers around eliminating plant pests now if you have just a few plants in your home it might be easy to eliminate pests say for instance you have one that has been affected by spider mites which we'll get into but you have one infected by spider mites and you could just maybe assure that plant out the door maybe you compost it and you just get it out and then you have no more plant pests in your home however if you're somebody like me and you have hundreds of plants in your home and you have really fallen in love with plants and you want to increase the size of your plant collection then it's really about managing pests and I want to be able to manage your expectations as well because it's really not going to be about eliminating the pests you're going to be in a much more proactive measure to keep plant pests at bay and to keep your plants healthy so let's talk a little bit more about preventative measures when it comes to pestiferous insects how do we prevent these bugs coming into our place in the first place and the one thing is buying from a trusted seller now this may not always be the case because bugs happen even to the best sellers and I have a little plant here my orbea that I got from a trusted seller and I don't think they even realized that there was mealy bugs and I don't know if they proliferated so much but when I got this Orbea out and I unwrapped it it literally was covered in mealy bugs I mean the whole thing was white I was like how could the seller even you know give this to me but that seller is a really trusted seller I've actually bought many different plants from this seller I have literally been treating this for about four weeks and have not had it touching any other plant which brings me to the next thing you want to inspect your plant so you might want to invest in a good magnifying lens and you could get a pocket lens a lot of these pestiferous insects and bugs and arthropods are just too small for us to see with our naked eye so unfortunately oftentimes we bring them into our home without even knowing so after buying from a trusted seller and inspecting your plant you're going to want to quarantine your plant now this is of course in a perfect world sometimes we get so excited that we have plants that we want to put the new plant right on our already crowded windowsill or crowded shelf space and their leaves are touching the other leaves of our plants but if you just get a new plant home you might actually want to stick it in a separate place just for a little while maybe it's one week maybe it's two weeks and you want to monitor that plant you want to inspect that plant and again that's exactly what I did with my Orbea I don't think I am ready to put her back next to any plants and that is largely because I still see mealy bugs and there is always this lag time so you might get rid of the adults but there might be some in the crawler stage still or there might be some eggs so you just want to give it a few weeks to breathe to make sure that you've got pretty much every pestiferous insect that is on that plant being proactive about our plants is also really important and these are topics that we've actually already discussed but you want to keep that plant healthy because as soon as that plant is stressed it might send out those chemical signals telling the world that it's stress and then the pestiferous insects come in and feast on your plant so you want to keep it healthy by giving it the right kind of light the right kind of temperature the right kind of humidity and also the right type of fertilizing and getting that on a schedule because the healthier your plant is the better off it's going to be [Music] so I've asked the community about what plant pests plague them and it was really fun to see because I have this in order of the amount of people who had mentioned these bugs and I'm going to be touching upon seven main plant pests and I'll touch upon a few others that had been mentioned but number one was fungus gnats which is crazy there's so many of you that have been dealing with fungus gnats I didn't even know it was a big issue until I got so many questions in throughout these last two years that I've doing plant one on me so that is a number one and we are going to be doing an entirely separate episode on fungus gnats because it is so popular and it is something that plagues so many of you so stay tuned for that episode spider mites a fits and thrips tied for number three for is mealy bugs five is scale surprisingly we got ants in there which I've never had an ant problem but I'm gonna toss that in there white flies and spring tails are actually tied for seven and then eight is millipede but we're we're not going to handle all of these all today we're going to primarily concentrate on seven and those seven will be scale now little brown scale or black scale and this could be a soft or a hard scale it almost looks a little bit like a raised bump or pimple on your plant they're very difficult to see I find that you see scales on brown stems sometimes under the leaves but oftentimes on woody plants and they are very challenging to see because they are very well camouflaged and then you have mealy bugs which is a type of scale and during the crawler stage they actually move the crawler stages a younger stage in the adult stage because with most scale once they're adults they just kind of plant themselves on the leaf or the stem or in a bud and they just stay there and they literally suck the life force and the juices out of the plant mealy bugs are challenging to see even though they are these cottony white insects and there's many different types of species of mealy bugs but we all kind of deal with them in very similar ways the next on my list that we'll be tackling is a fits and a fit they kind of congregate there like if you see a bunch of like zebra or nu out in the wild these are the ones that kind of congregate next to one another and I like to squash them between my fingers I know that sounds really weird but they kind of give this satisfying little pop between your fingers if you want to squish them that way but they all kind of congregate unlike the new early stages of the buds or the Lee often times near flowers and they are a common problem both indoors and outdoors next is white flies they kind of look like a little bit more of a powdery moth I mean they're not neither a fly or a moth but these are members of Hemet Durin's they are the true sucking insects and they also suck the plant juices oftentimes because they're white they may be misconstrued for mealy bugs but they have wings and they will fly especially if you scare them or you hit a leaf and they start to fly all over the place I have not had much white flies in my house the only time I had them was when I was growing potatoes indoors and I haven't had them since the next one we're gonna be tackling is thrips thrips is a little different than the other ones that I had mentioned because they have a little bit more of a scraping mouth part and these are incredibly challenging to see the ones that I've seen in my house in the early stages they're a little bit like green and then the older stages they're a little black but they almost look like little lead shards they're they're so challenging to see but if you start to see your chlorophyll being scraped off and all these like silvery markings then that is probably thrips and it's thr IPS it is both singular and plural so if somebody says I have thrips and they probably have they can either have one or they could have hundreds which hundreds is probably more likely the second to last one will be spider mites and spider mites are not an insect so if you're trying to deal with spider mites with insecticides or pesticides then it's not going to work and as a matter of fact I'm not going to be talking about insecticides or pesticides at all so if you are a chemical warrior and you want to douse your plants and chemicals then you probably are going to have to tune in to a different channel because I'm going to be talking about more natural ways to deal with our pestiferous insects so if that appeals to you then you could still tune in here and then finally we'll just touch upon fungus gnats but as I had mentioned before longest gnats are going to be for a completely separate episode because there are so many different ways to actually deal with fungus gnats and I often like to use a multi-pronged approach to any pestiferous insects again fungus gnats are actually not really pestiferous when it comes to our plants they're more just like annoying things they fly into your nose holes and your eyes and they kind of hang around your plants and they're in the soil and they're popping all over the place I even had a fungus gnat that got caught behind the screen of my computer and we had to actually take the computer to the Apple store and get that fixed because it was just so annoying that was how annoying these fungus gnats were when I had them but since that time I've have pretty much you know eliminated or at least managed the fungus gnat level oftentimes I'll see like a few here and there but there are so many different ways that you could prevent and be proactive about them now I will touch upon very quickly ants millipedes and springtails as well since those were questions springtails are kalimba ants are of course an insect of millipedes they are not insects at all now none of those will really affect your plant if you have ants chances are you probably have some other type of pestiferous insect or if you have if it's indoors you probably have food in your house and maybe that's something that they're attracted to or you might have a fidex 200 the aphids because basically a fats are sucking all those sweet juices out of your plant and then pooping them out at the end and insect poop is called frass and oftentimes ants are attracted to that and they will actually harvest and cultivate that honeydew and take it back to their little ant hole and feed all their little ant friends and have a little ant party but you basically need to either get some ant traps or you could get nematodes and deal with them that way as far as springtails and millipedes go they're not going to affect your plant so if they are affecting you then you might want to see whether your plant is too moist because oftentimes they like a little bit more moist environment springtails will help they have like this little if they if you see things jumping around chances are you have springtails millipedes are the ones with like a lot of lots of little legs not the centipedes but the millipedes usually are the ones like living in moist soil if you don't want them then you might want to get a little bit more like beneficial nematodes which are totally microscopic like little round worm type things that get into the guts of the millipedes or the ants for instance or you could get some diatomaceous earth which is made out of diatoms which if you've ever looked at a diatom underneath the microscope they are beautiful little crystal like creatures that are very ancient and you could get de or diatomaceous earth I would get the food grade kind and it's a little bit more like a powder it doesn't really affect you I wouldn't necessarily breathe it in but it does kind of get into the joints and kind of cuts up all of these little different creatures but if these things are not really bothering your plants and they don't bother you then I wouldn't necessarily go on all-out warfare against these non pestiferous plant quote/unquote pests so I would just deal with the main ones that could actually harm your plant which again is scale mealy bugs aphids white flies thrips and spider mites so let's talk about some common approaches to pest management and generally for all the ones that I had mentioned except for fungus gnats this is how I deal with pests in my home now the first line of defense for me is my hose now I know a lot of us don't have an indoor hose but even you might have like one of those little hoses that come out of your sink and that sprays your dirty dishes using something like that is like super helpful or you may want to invest in a hose and attach it to your sink as I have in a very MacGyver kind of way and use that because that is the first line of defense there's no chemicals being used there it's just pure water and you're just lightly but firmly spraying your plant and I think like this works for the vast majority of insects that I mentioned except maybe for brown scale because that you really have to dislodge and sometimes the water is not even enough to dislodge the scale sometimes you have to work it with your fingernails and just try to pick them off however if you have mealy bugs if you have a fits particularly aphids are the ones that are the most easy to get dislodged and what I usually do is if you have some cellophane or a plastic bag and especially if you just have a plant with a stem like this pelargonium that I have here you'll want to put the plastic or the cellophane in and around the plant and that is to prevent any pests falling into the soil and also preventing too much water going to the soil because if you're using sharp sprays of the hose you may actually just over water your plant as well so you just want to be a little bit more mindful of course if you have a well draining mix and everything that we went over about over watering plants if you're following those rules then you probably are not going to have to worry about over watering your plants when you're dealing with pests when it comes to your plants so once you've sprayed your plant and you've dried it off one of the next lines of defense is a horticultural spray and essentially a lot of horticultural sprays even though they can be different brands and they can be different types of oils all work in the same way they actually suffocate the insect so insects have these little breathing tubes called spiracles and it kind of gets into the insect and it prevents them from breathing and so they end up suffocating and they really work on contact these are not systemic insecticides or pesticides you actually have to spray the plant and actually a lot of horticultural oils if you ever had a fungus or a fungal disease or a type of rust these could actually be great preventative measures as well for any type of mildews like powdery mildew or rust which is a an orange type of fungus that sometimes gets on to our leaves both indoor and outdoor plants I've actually seen it so horticultural sprays are great for that but they are not something that kind of stick on your plant so you actually have to reapply them multiple times one thing I should say about horticultural oil sprays however is that a lot of them are synthesized from petroleum-based products you'll see that maybe like 1% of it is the active ingredient and like 99% of it is some other type of filler and you do have to be cautious when you're spraying horticultural sprays oftentimes they'll tell you to spray like one or two of the leaves of your plant now unfortunately if your plant only has one or two leaves then you're probably shouldn't be spraying it on the plant but you test it on a leaf first to make sure that the the plant doesn't have any kind of adverse reactions what kind of adverse reactions can happen well you don't want to be spraying your plant in really hot really dry or very cold conditions because it will have some sometimes phytotoxic effects on the plant where it could actually burn the leaf or it could discolor the leaf if you have a plant that has a lot of dark leaves then it's often recommended not to spray horticultural oil on dark leaf plants because it actually can stain the plant leaves so that would be a bad thing if you have a very prized dark leaved possession on your hands in your home so I would be you know cautious about that and also if your plant is just way too stressed say you have missed those spider mites and you have you know webbing all over your plant your plant may be a little bit too far gone in order to be able to use horticultural spray so I would just say you might have to move that plant outdoors maybe eventually it goes into the compost pile I don't know but if the plant is way too stressed and you're not really on top of it then I don't think that you're going to want to waste your time spring horticultural oil all over that plant and you could totally make your own horticultural spray at home and I'll teach you how to do that but these are some of the popular ones that you could buy off the shelf and again they might have different chemistry but they kind of all work the same way now I had a very interesting question from one of our subscribers got a 1:31 and she says please talk about neem oil do I use it straight up or dilute it and that is an excellent question because neem comes in two forms and I don't know if many of us actually know this but you could get a neem oil spray and that actually works in the same way that a horticultural spray what is that actually suffocates the insect pest but it's a made out of a clarified hydrophobic oil so clarified just means that it's been removed hydrophobic means that it's afraid of water and an oil which you know oil and water they don't usually mix but because they use other types of chemistry in there they get it into this kind of sprayable matter so that doesn't even have any of the active ingredient left it may have a little bit of the neem smell but the active ingredient actually comes from the as a direct indica tree which is the neem tree that is native to India and they extract as a direct in from the seed of the as a director indica tree and they extract that by using alcohol and then one of the chemicals is the clarified hydrophobic oil and the other one is the pure neem which is as a directon I would highly recommend getting one that is a organic cold pressed oil so organic cold pressed oil means that it hasn't used any kind of solvents to affect the clarity and the consistency and the natural benefits of the neem oil so I'll talk about that secondly but that actually works very different than the neem oil spray and I have to say I don't really get a lot of neem oil spray I mean I do get it if I can't get a horticultural spray or I can't make it myself but it actually gives me a headache I know a number of you have written in and you say ad gives me a headache as well some people actually like the smell of it but if it makes you ill or gives you a headache then I would be very mindful when you're spraying it I would maybe even wear a little face mask if it makes you ill as well and just because it's a natural thing and it's it's synthesized or it's extracted from a natural product it doesn't necessarily make it safe and I actually have this pelargonium here because this type of smell for us it smells good this one happens to smell like rose but you could get citronella lemon smelling ones and oftentimes we think oh this smells feels so pretty for us but no it's not for you oftentimes they produce these chemicals to prevent herb every which is eating of the leaves or sucking insects or anything along those lines and so these things get basically removed from the plant and synthesized or packaged in a way for us to use as insecticides or pesticides or things to prevent pests which totally makes sense because these plants are rooted in their environment and they have been preventing or being proactive against herbivory in so many different ways so it makes sense that we actually extract them from our plants in order to be able to help us out in our homes but that doesn't necessarily mean that it reacts well with us as well so when you're spraying these things be mindful of how you're spraying them and what you're spraying them and who you're spraying them around make sure that you follow directions and don't spray it during the times when it's dry hot sunny too cold or even when the plant is too stressed so if you have a plant say it's affected by a spider mite and it already has like that kind of thick webbing on it and your plant is like you know really far gone wasting your money on horticultural spray is probably not going to bring that plant back I had a beautiful Sanchez iya and literally for about six months I was like back and forth you know trying to get the Sanchez iya out of the situation that I was in which had a bunch of spider mites and then when the plant was stressed it brought in some mealy bugs and then even some thrips and I was going back and forth when really I should have just kind of shifted out the door and composted it because that battle was lost and it was a a brave attempt but some of us can't save our plants when they're too stressed so don't waste your money on horticultural oil you think your plant is too far gone so let's get back to goddess one three ones question on meme because these do different types of neem products work very differently and if you are using the cold pressed oil from neem which is the the oil from the seed this works more for insects when they ingest the plant so if you have caterpillars for instance munching on the leaves this is going to be the one that you end up using whereas the clarified hydrophobic oil this is really not for it works similarly to the all the other horticultural sprays it's more about suffocating the insect the the oil from the seed actually gets into the digested digestion system of the insects that are munching on the leaves and then it starts to affect the insects over time so if you want to make your own mix of this and and goddess 1-3-1 asks do you use it straight up or dilute it if you're buying this stuff then you want to dilute it because this is way too strong so what I would recommend is about four to six teaspoons of your as a direct in seed oil and then about four teaspoons of a castile soap and if you are in the United States you will know dr. Bronner's it's a very popular eco-friendly soap it's kind of watery and they come in small bottles and also really large bottles so I don't know what brand if you're coming in from you know an international place but you might have a different one pure castile soap unscented is going to be perfect so four teaspoons of that to about a gallon of water and then you could actually put it into something like this which is a spray bottle this is a little bit more of a professional spray bottle that you use if you want to fertilize your plants fully early or if you want to spray your plants with mist or in the case of this one you're going to want to deal with pests and you're going to want to all over your plants both on the underside of leaves on the stems kind of in the crotches and the crevices of the plant and also on tops of the leaves after you have tested it but this will be perfect if you have some of those munching plant eaters and if you have those sucking insects which I had mentioned like mealy bugs and you have a fitting along those lines they will be less affected by this and again these affect more of the younger stages of the insect like a caterpillar is a young stage of a moth or a butterfly and it's going to be munching on those leaves so it's not going to really affect the adult stage and the horticultural oil is going to basically smother any stage so maybe the egg may be the adult may be the larvae and it works more on contact so you're going to have to reapply this on a weekly to bi-weekly basis because if there are eggs that didn't get affected by it then you're just going to have an explosion of insects again so this is something that you are constantly having to deal with so let's just recap those two things first I spray my plants with a good sharp spray from the hose then you let that dry out and then you could use a horticultural oil or your kind of neem sprays and then after I let that sit I might actually bring in integrated pest management and if anybody who has tuned into these episodes you will know that I am a big believer in beneficial insects which I know is completely untraditional and I absolutely love every single one of you who have now started to bring integrated pest management into your repertoire of dealing with pestiferous insects and bugs in your home because so many of us are kind of kicked out by bugs and I do have to say that I am so glad I've gotten you over that hump of dealing with and bringing in more good bugs into your home in order to deal with the bad bugs insects have been a passion of mine for a very long time many of you will know that I went to school partially for entomology which is a study of insects I focus mainly on aquatic insects but I kind of love all bugs and I've been using integrated pest management for almost a decade now you know this is something that Botanical Gardens do and a number of other people do in their gardens outdoors and I've had really good benefits by bringing beneficial insects into my home but you don't want to be spraying your neem and you're horticultural oil or like diatomaceous earth or anything along those lines after you get your beneficial bugs you don't want to do that you want to leave some breathing space and then bring in your beneficial insects because beneficial insects are also insects and it can actually affect your good bugs as well as bad bugs if you're going to be using horticultural oils or sprays or neem or anything along those lines so just be wary of that and give your good bugs time to really do what they do best which is eating bad bugs and I often go in a very proactive measure during this spring summer and fall months on a three to four week basis I will bring in green lacewing larvae and again this goes to a question that I had from subscriber Melissa Elle who are your favorite apartment friendly beneficials and Melissa I don't know if you've been tuning in to some of my previous episodes but many of you will know that I love the neurons the green lace wings and they are called a fat Lions their larvae is called are called a fat lions and they really live up to their name because they are feasting on a fits and spider mites and thrips and mealy bugs and sometimes scale so these are generalist predators I will give a link to the types of green lacewing larvae I like to get them they kind of come in this grid and they have their own individual rooms because they are so hungry they are so voracious that they will actually cannibalize and eat each other if they don't have any food so as soon as you get them out of their little container they are going to look for those bad insects and they are going to destroy them and again this goes back to the fact that you want to be managing your pests like once you have pests in your home it's very hard to eliminate them but I have to say when you bring beneficial insects in they give your plants new hope because these are like your little legions your little forces who are out there tackling those bad bugs and that is awesome those are my failsafe but of course I get other types of beneficials in depending on the type of pest and there are many and I go into this more deeply in each single pest that I've mentioning here and more on the house plant master class so for the basics I'm just going to leave this on a foundational level and letting you know that sharp sprays from your hose and then you could go the horticultural spray route you could also bring in sticky traps depending on what the insect is so you might see yellow and blue sticky traps blue is perfect for the adult thrips because they do fly and they are attracted more to the color blue and then yellow sticky traps which is perfect for fungus gnats which again we'll get into and also white flies so those are some cultural methods that you could use and then of course biological control also known as integrated pest management also known as beneficial insects so and of course if you don't like bugs if your roommate doesn't like bugs if your husband or wife doesn't like bugs boyfriend-girlfriend then you might have to look into other options I'm afraid but they are the ones that I really like and of course if you don't have a lot of plants in your home then you probably wouldn't want to invest in beneficials because I do have to say they are expensive they're not really expensive per se but the shipping costs a lot because you have to ship them overnight because otherwise you know they're live creatures and they are fragile and they can die very quickly especially if it's it in cold or heat so as soon as you get them you want to get them out of your mail and you know release them on your plants and sometimes the best way to release them is at dusk or at night because some of them are attracted to light so you want to be a little bit more mindful that I hope this gives you a really good first line of defense when it comes to pestiferous bugs in their home and remember I go more in depth in the house plant master class and stay tuned because we have another episode coming up on fungus gnats what did you think of this bad bug episode tell me in the comments below and if you've been enjoying all these episodes do me a favor and hit both the subscribe button and the notification spell subscribing helps grow the channel but it's really only the notification spell that will inform you of new episodes and remember you can always follow along on my journey on Instagram at homestead Brooklyn and my blog at homestead Brooklyn com you

Channel: Summer Rayne Oakes

Views: 292,523

Rating: 4.8993402 out of 5

Keywords: Summer Rayne Oakes, Homestead Brooklyn, Plant One On Me, houseplants, house plants, houseplant care, houseplant pests, eradicate houseplant pests, mealybugs, fungus gnats, aphids, spider mites, scale, get rid of scale, get rid of fungus gnats, kill aphids, how to get rid of spider mites, manage houseplant pests, what is this houseplant pest?, get rid of mealybugs, springtails

Id: l7ueDssU_kY

Length: 35min 18sec (2118 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019