Houseplant Pests: Get Rid of Them Organically!

[Music] let's face it pests suck they suck the SAP out of your plants they desiccate them they make them Pocky and yellow and then they can kill them if we don't pay attention to our plants but we won't see it coming so we just have to like learn how to figure the stuff out as quickly as we possibly can to like stop this stuff from happening so you don't need to be an entomologist you don't need to have a degree in botany or whatever you just need to kind of open your eyes and look to see if something's going on with your plants okay so let's just start with mealy bugs because I have this advert like a major adverse in' to mealy bugs because they just they're gross they're just gross and they are soft and hairy and white and sticky and they kind of get in the crevices of your plants and I don't like the way they look and I like what they do to my plants and it's like one of the bugs that I get I don't know I don't get a lot of other ones but I get mealy bugs and it really frustrates me anyway so let's just talk about what they are right they're just insects that suck the SAP and juices out of your plants and they don't move a lot they just kind of get on there and form in clusters and start eating and laying eggs and that's scary but that's what they do listen outdoors when your plants are outside they have a lot of natural predators we don't have that indoors well some of us don't and those populations of bad bugs can get out of control because nature is not inside really doing its thing so anyway so that's what the mealy bug population can grow pretty quickly if you don't notice it the good thing is pretty easy to notice because it looks like white fuzz like white little hay all over the leaves and the cracks in the leaves so you can pretty easily identify it and you can get a magnifying glass like this one or any one and just if you have eyesight like me it really helps to get in there you might be thinking like where do they come from where are these bugs showing up from I got this plant it was perfect and everything was great and then I woke up one day and my what what is that they just they can come from anywhere they can come from soil that it was maybe in the soil of the plant that you got maybe it came from like outdoors if they put your plant outside can even come from produce like you bring in from the grocery store you don't know where it's coming from it's like we don't know everything but we do know when it's there and we know it's time to treat it so let's talk about how do we treat me lux like what's the first thing you should do and I think the first thing you should do is depending on the infestation if you just have a few mealy bugs on your plants you'll wipe them off just wipe them off you can use your hands if you want or you can use a towel you can use a q-tip but you get in there wipe them off you can use alcohol bring them into like the shower spray them get this sticky stuff off the leaves which is tough sometimes it's tough like that honeydew and they do excrete a honeydew which is the poop it's bug poop and yeah so that's pretty good indication too that you have mealy bugs but so you can do that and then I like to use neem oil and what I do is I dilute the neem oil if I don't already have a diluted solution to like 1% neem oil to like 99% water and then you can add a little bit of just soap so cuz you know oil and water don't mix you kind of be all learn that in a second or first grade and we learned it so you can add that and it helps emulsify mul safai I think that's the word from science class we can stick together and so that helps so you can spray the foliage with that neem oil solution you can use horticultural oil which is like the same thing what that's what that does a horticultural oil is that it um it suffocates right it's not the case like the larval stages and the adults because they're still there right the adults are still there anyway it just kind of just suffocates them sounds horrible but we have to control them we are being nature inside we're just pretend you're like a ladybug or something doing your thing you're doing your thing for your plants that sounds cruel first thing really should do is isolate them take it away from your plant collection if you have one if you have just one one or two plants it's not that much of a problem but you should still isolate it like bring it to the bathroom and put it in the bathtub and then do the washing do the rub down in the bathtub because that's a good place just rinse this rinses it into the septic system I guess it just keeps it away from your plants so I slayed it wash it remove anything you can remove and then use the horticultural oil or the neem oil and I really want to talk about organic solutions here I don't want to talk about pesticides because I don't really want to introduce them into people's homes and my home so I'm really really trying to stay away from that solution so I think you can do it organically but you need to be persistent that's the key like it's not gonna go away in a day like you might have to do these procedures two three four weeks it depends when you notice that everything is gone then you've succeeded that's kind of it so just don't give up don't give up on your plant and then you know there's probably gonna be things that you can't see in the soil like you might have mealy bug eggs in the first top inch or two of the soil so to be sure take that soil away and replace it and if you're really not sure about the pot you can repot it into a pot that's been treated sterilized and using and you sterilized potting soil when when you repot it so if you want to eliminate any of those factors that maybe there's still something in there change it all out okay that's like the best way you can avoid getting more mealy bugs but you got to stay with it another thing you can do and I'll talk about this at the end of the video is that you can use a hydrogen peroxide wrench to kind of get through the soil and you can do a foliar spray which will help just keep away pass and it'll kill some as well so we'll talk about that later that's another thing you can do for the me like this is not a mealy bug I'm holding it up like it's a mealy bug it's a Hoya sorry about a fits it fits our if you see them closely if you see them really closely they have like these pear-shaped soft bodies and they they don't come in many different colors who they are they there are a foods that have many different colorations right there's like red there's black there's the bright chartreuse color there's a lot of different types of aphids and the ones that we get inside all do the kind of same thing they suck the juices out of the foliage they have these little piercing sucker mouth things that they just stick in there and suck it up and then they poop out honeydew and that's how you know if it's a really hard to see and you gotta get in there and look I have a plant right here this philodendron that I don't know what the heck is on it because I think I did it in the last video and there's some it might be a fizz I can't tell it because my eyesight is so bad but in anyway I'm treating it I'm washing it I'm treating it the honeydew stuff does not come off that readily so you're gonna have to just deal with it the kids are like they just blow up right the if all of a sudden becomes a colony of aphids and you think like how did I miss that good is easy to miss it it's when you start seeing the honeydew you'll know wait am I got a problem or my plants got a problem here so let's fix it so what do we do to fix it how do we control these soft body squishy a little tiny nuisances I'm gonna tell you the first thing I would do I would just get a hose with cold water and that's pray the heck out of it I would just turn it upside down try to dislodge those little soft bodied buggers get rid of them and do that for a few days and then if that doesn't work then I'll start treating it I like to do as little as possible in terms of adding anything to the plant just because I don't really have that much time and it seems like it's a lot easier just to take the water and just get rid of them they just will they're easy to get rid of that way they have to stay on it and if you are unsure that that's going to work then you can use the neem oil solution you can use a horticultural spray and that will just kind of you know like I said before it'll just suffocate any of evening adults the larvae anything that's there the eggs so it's a good preventative so the other thing you can do is you can soapy water like take some liquid DISA dish soap mix it with some water Shh and just spray it because that also just smothers them it sounds so mean because I don't really like to hurt anything but um you know it's it's a toss-up I don't want my plants to die so I'm just gonna pretend I'm a ladybug eating the plants that's what I'm doing in my head so you can use soapy water and spray it you just get a spray bottle you can use diatomaceous earth and put it around the soil the other thing I'll talk about later at the end of this video is using natural predators because I'll tell you natural predators love a fits because they're just like little peanut M&Ms for them they just pop them in there just like that grapes if you're not into candy so yeah anyway so that's the I'll talk about that but there's many many different things you can do many beneficial insects you can bring in to help control aphids this is um this is a subject I'm very sensitive to it's called scale this insect it's like it almost acts like a mollusk right it's a soft bodied insect that creates it excretes this this mint this substance that creates like a hard shell over its body and then it protects itself and then it lays eggs under that like armor and it's hard to get to like we can get to it because we have thumbs and nails and we can scrape them off but like in the general world of nature it's pretty protected so anyway they're kind of a nuisance but the good news is that if you find a one or two or three you can scrape them off right because that's it hasn't proliferated but if you have a plant that invested that can be problematic because who has the time to scrape off every tiny little scale on your plant I've tried it and I've actually done it with this peperomia I took the time because this means a lot to me this plant and I did it and I was gonna try to show you an example of a real-life scale but I think I managed to get rid of the scale on this plant and you just look underneath and that mean it's dirty but I don't I don't see any scale on it which I'm pretty thankful for but yes scale is kind of gross and difficult to treat I had to get rid of a very large staghorn fern because I didn't look at it enough and the scale just went to town so anyway the methods are to get rid of scale is manually remove them if you can my dog is scratching at the doors so I have me crazy and that is actually pretty effective it's effective if you don't have that many and the other thing you can do again it's constant neem oil solution you know I would say you have to give it like a month if you have a pretty big infestation so do that over and over again wash them first use the neem oil wash it again a couple of days later or a week later depending on how much time you have and then spray it again and you know so you got to do that and then listen if it's bad if you've got like one or two branches that are just covered in it just cut it off and don't forget that you have to always disinfect your tools between cuts when you're cutting something that you really think is infected so you use complete 100% rubbing alcohol you dip it in and disinfect it okay because you don't want to spread that stuff around it's nasty let's imagine that we've eradicated this scale but we're like not completely sure that it's out of the soil do the same thing take the first couple of inches off the top of this of their puppy or soil of your plant if you can and replace it with sterile soil and if you really are not sure take the whole plant out of the pot shake as much soil away clean the pot or change the pot get a brand new pot and plant it back in there and then you'll see you will know but keep your eyes on it make sure that you look at it because if you see one or two pop up get the neem oil out again and start that regiment okay because it helps it helps you have to stay on it one more thing with scale you can take a little little cotton swab on a stick and put alcohol on it and just go in there and dab dab it with alcohol and then you'll hear like it means it's working you're not gonna hear that but I imagine that sound so you can just dab it with alcohol that's if you have not just a few and not an infestation if you've got 30 you can get in there and do that pretty quickly white love you know talking about white flies I don't have white flies I don't have never had white flies and I think white flies white flies are much more common outdoors in gardens and landscapes not so much indoors but it happens and you'll know you have white flies if you like shake if you shake a plant and then all sudden these like little white moths like tiny little white moths starts flying in the air it's kind of like you know right at that point and what do you do like yeah what do you do with them how do you get rid of them very very similar to the way you get rid of aphids so what you want to do is you want to use a cold spray of water and just like just push them off just blow them off the leaves and it's kind of they're not like they don't have claws they just will go flying away which is great do it outdoors or do it someplace where you're not gonna blow it on other plants cuz like what's the point solve one problem to create like a myriad of other problems you don't want to do that so anyway so do it in this place in a place that you won't infest other plants spray it off with water use neem oil use a horticultural oil because that really does work and this they're a lot easier to get rid of then say scale you know another thing I heard is like putting flat were on the leaves I don't know how that's gonna it really how the flower is gonna stay on the leaves I'm gonna try it I'm gonna do a little demo and see what happens cuz I hear I read that it makes them constipated can you kill an insect by making them constipated maybe I don't know we'll find out and once again beneficial insects beneficial insects will go from plant to plant looking for something new to eat that's good I mean yes there's different types and I'll talk about them at the end of the video because I just wanna talk about it in one section so white flies like I said I don't have them but they're not that difficult to get rid of and they're pretty easy to recognize they look like little tiny white moths uh do you guys want to talk about fungus gnats because I feel like if I start talking about it they're gonna start just showing up fungus max fungus gnats are annoying fungus gnats make me want to sell my house and move when I had them when it was bad so but I quickly realized that the number one thing first I'll tell you what a fungus gnat is it looks like a fruit fly and there might be some in here because there were I don't know I think I got him out they look like annoying fruit flies and they have a little they just suck they're annoying but they don't really do much damage as adults I do hear they're not really sure about this that they eat the roots of your plants but I really think they just eat the fungus around the roots of your plants and maybe if you have a high enough population they could be feeding on the roots but they really want to eat the fungus so the best way to control fungus gnats is to let your soil dry out between waterings did all depending on the kind of plant you have obviously if you have a lot of ferns that's gonna be hard to do and you might have a little bit of a problem but soil dryness stops this cycle because they just have a cycle that they find and then they can they lay eggs in the soil element and the eggs hatch and it's just ridiculous and it's hard to stop it if you don't like your soil dry so do that that's the first thing you should do and another thing you can do is put those little sticky tape things in your soyal that just like get caught in my hair when i ever i go down to change one that's really really hard to get out of your hair and it but I can I've done it twice so yeah the sticky notes will sticky not so sticky tapes will give you an indication of like how bad your population is and it's really not a form of control as it is of a way of understanding how bad your problem is so you can use those two and yes they get stuck on the tape and they die but they probably already laid their eggs so anyway that's another thing you can do and then the other thing you can do is you can use I got sily on silent I can't say the word sily on cinnamon I'm gonna say it I'm gonna put it here cinnamon and I hear silent Cylon cinnamon is better and you sprinkle it on the surface of the soil and what the cinnamon does itah kills fungus and the fungus is what the fungus gnats eat so that makes sense and that's been working for me especially plants I have to water a lot like the ferns but a little cinnamon on it it smells good too so that's what you can do for that and you can do like a hydrogen peroxide hydrogen peroxide I can't say it hydrogen there goes the heater hold on a second okay let me try that again you can use a hydrogen peroxide like wash a drench that's what it's called and it'll just kind of go through the soil and it'll kill fungus and it'll sometimes kill insects or deter them mainly but I'll talk about that after this so yeah you can use that to control fungus gnats okay so there's also this thing called mosquito bits which I found out about recently and that but I didn't realize that had BT in it with it which is Beck's illest thunder insists or something I'm gonna rape I'm gonna write that down here too but it's a biological control it's completely safe try it and you don't even know it's in there which is great it's not like you're introducing bugs if you're opposed to having beneficial bugs in your house because it's not for everybody it really isn't but it's a better it's a better solution if you don't want bugs in your house right I should have started out by saying just inspect your plants before you bring them into your house because if you see little glossy beads a tiny little glossy beads in the soil it could be the larvae of fungus gnats or if you hit the side of the pot like I did before and you see anything coming out of it plant back put it back or if you've gotten it in the mail send it back because you just you don't need that you don't need to introduce that into your house just look at the health of your plant at the soil and it'll tell you whether or not potentially if you have fungus gnats or not sometimes they come out a little bit later so just just be aware just if you see it get rid of it or treat it depends on what the plant is if it's like a prized plant if you pay for a lot of money for it you're probably not gonna throw it out I know I wouldn't if that guy got fungus gnats I'm not throwing it out staying with me yes you are one more thing about the fungus gnats predators biological control they work well so I'll talk about that later too I think you can use predators for pretty much all of your plant problems I mean anyway pest problems you guys want to talk about spider mites I don't I really don't want to talk about spider mites I really want them to just not ever be in my house and the worst problem I had I had Croton I had a Croton that just got like badly badly infested and I put it outside and I sprayed it off and guess what it was fine it was fine like it was amazing how well that worked spider mites can easily well you know if they are they're little arachnids let's talk about what they are they're just little tiny dots that are hard to see that you just have to get in there and discover and you'll also see that there's like this very fine webbing and that is a good indication that you have spider mites don't be confused with just regular spider webs because sometimes there are beneficial spiders that are on your plants that you want to leave there so just get a magnifying glass to be sure and also you'll notice that like the foliage will have little conducts all over it where they've kind of sucked out and eaten part of the plant so that's another indication of spider mites but there are different colors and they're just as annoying as everything else that I'm talking about but that's how you spot a spider mite webbing little tiny dots on the leaves and if you can see them they look like little spiders because they are what what do you do to control spider mites well the problem is if you have hot dry air they like to show up on particular plants like ivy is probably like the hosts of spider mite I every time I've had ivy in the house it always gets spider mites and I always have to get rid of it so I think if you take if you bring in plants that are kind of prone to getting spider mites you're probably gonna get spider mites but what do you do if you want to prevent them from showing up or from exploding in population wash the leaves at least once a week take it to the shower take it to the hose take it to the sink and just rinse the undersides of the leaves especially so turn the plant upside down and wash it you can do that and you can also I think you can use neem oil as a preventative so after you wash the leaves spray everywhere around the plant and then do it again next week because plants like ivy and in certain crotons and other plants you kind of have to stay a step ahead of the mites okay and also clean the leaves because dust seems to attract the spider mites maybe they eat that too I don't really know why but if you keep your plants healthy and clean and dust free you have a less less of a chance of attracting spider mites you can use okay I feel like I'm repeating myself but a horticultural oils the neem oils the soapy water diatomaceous earth everything you can think of for what we've talked about for like aphids and and wife lice white flies the same goes for spider mites just my recommendation is wash them off wash them off and use neem oil and if anybody has any other suggestions and it are treatments please put it down in the comments because it'll be very very helpful everybody has different ways of doing things and I just go for like the most effective way and that's usually just washing stuff off and spraying neem oil it works because neem oil is 100% safe and I like to use that in in my house okay so let's let's kind of wrap this up and talk about like just very natural ways of preventing pests right things that we can do that are just going to make it a lot easier for us in the future and things that are kind of organic and natural to use so the thing to prevent pest infestations like I said before rinse and disinfect your tools between use that's huge because it'll stop the migration of plants of pests from one plant to another and the other thing you should do is start with a healthy plant start with the plant that you know has nothing wrong with it right I mean listen there's gonna be potentially a leaf doesn't look perfect or I understand that but in general start with the plant that you can actually see nothing wrong with it no bugs nothing flying out of the soil no fungus no bacteria just start with a healthy plant you know if you don't like if you don't start if you don't start with a healthy plant sometimes if you have a damaged leaf it could be an invitation for a bacteria and fungus to form so you want to make sure that you have as healthy of a plant as possible and not introduce bacteria and the other thing I was just gonna say is that okay you don't also a lot also don't spray your leaves in the evening like if you're a big mister you like to mist your plants don't spray in the evening as that's another like open door for a bacteria wet leaves are generally not good if you're trying to avoid bacteria and fungus but I'm not talking about bacteria and fungus I'm talking about a pest so let me just get back in line with what I was saying so I was talking a lot about hydrogen peroxide and there's a couple of ways you can use hydrogen peroxide in the first way is you can use it as a soil drench you can mix I think the soil drench is three percent hydrogen peroxide to 97 percent water and so you mix that up and you can just like flush it through the soil and what it does is that it'll it's good because it'll aerate your soil and it actually acts a little bit like a fertilizer but it'll also deter plants from entering the soil and make them go away from the soil which is a really great thing and the other thing you can do you can dilute the hydrent of hydrogen peroxide to 1% it's a 99% water and put it in a spray bottle and use it as a foliar spray and that also helps get act as a preventative from pests wanting to come on to the foliage of your plant because like it's good to stay a step ahead but hydrogen peroxide actually works across the board for everything I said and just why not use it it's cheap and and it's completely safe so I recommend using that definitely starting with that oh I forgot so it also helps prevent root rot I'm not sure how it does that maybe because it's eating or preventing the fungus from forming around the roots so that's a good thing so that's just an added bonus for hydrogen peroxide let's talk about beneficial bugs like there see there is like a literally a fungus gnat flying around in front of that camera it's pretty interesting about beneficial bugs I need them in here right now so I released 600 ladybugs in this garage a couple of months ago and I guess it helped I don't know I think it did I didn't think the kinds that I got don't really like to eat nealy bugs I hear the black lady beetles or a black lady bugs go to town on the mealy bug so I'm gonna get that I'm gonna get those next time but they're fantastic they're predators they look cute they do get in your hair and they and they do startle you sometimes and I have to admit that I've killed a couple because I just reacted and did that and so I feel really bad but anyway they're still around here there's not as many because basically what happens is once they eat what they need to eat or if they're not finding the food need hi they died I feel bad I feel bad but I'm just gonna keep going and I'm a ladybug Amelie wait a minute I'm a dead lady back so lace wings are also really good they eat seamed things a soft-bodied insects and they just are they're good and they're not big and annoying so you should think about bringing some lace wings if you have a situation like this if you're not opposed to having some bugs flying around your house it's not easy to know what buggers what bug is good and what bug is bad and it's not easy to explain to your friends that you have good bugs in the house you need to educate people because with nothing wrong with it if it's not making anybody sick it's not that big of a deal I think there are some predatory mites too that are like almost microscopic you can see them you could probably see them better than I can and you have to release them on the plants and they just eat stuff in the soil they eat stuff on the foliage you're just hungry good bugs and I'm gonna list a couple I'm going to show you a couple of different types some options for you right here and the other thing you can do in general is just have good air circulation if your air is moving a little bit it's going to just make a less of an environment like a humid environment or a stale environment for bugs to just start like latching onto your plants to just keep the air moving you probably have an air conditioning unit or a hot air system in your house or wherever you live that's automatically moving the air but if you don't get a little fan and just let it like oscillate around it just let them let the foliage feel the breeze because they like it too a little bit of stimulation goes a long way for these plants and it helps keep the bugs away so that's kind of it with my bug talk yeah there's other insects of course and I don't know everything about bugs I don't really know a lot I just know the basics and because that's what I encounter and when I encounter something I try to figure out what it is and I try to eradicate it as quickly as I can I don't freak out when I see bugs in my plans I have like I said before I have some on this philodendron i don't really know what it is I can't tell what it is I think it's a fits but it doesn't look like Avis to me so I'm gonna troubleshoot that and I have some Millie bugs and micro Sonia you know I've had I have some bugs I'm sorry I'm not perfect and as long as I don't let it get out of control every time I walk by the plant I spray a little neem oil on it and honestly I think some of those mealy bugs are dead it's really hard to tell whether they're alive or dead because they don't really move that much and scale guess what it's not moving at least the hard-bodied ones are the soft body ones move a little bit but not much that's what this this is what this could be I bet this is the soft body scale so I'm gonna go deal with this and try to get rid of it I think it's think I think they're dead I think they're dead anyway so like I said before next video will be about exciting diseases and fungus and and just general problems with some plants maybe it's not the next video but it'll be in a couple of weeks cuz I don't wanna talk about this thing and fro it will be I want to talk about a beautiful planets are making cool things the bugs are a real problem and we are we're all gonna experience some form of exposure to it so that's it I'm done rambling you guys thank you so much have a great week I'll see you on Friday and keep the bugs away from your plants bye or try you just try

Channel: PLANTERINA

Views: 415,330

Rating: 4.9206409 out of 5

Keywords: Houseplant care, indoor plant care, pest prevention, houseplant pests, indoor plant pests, organic pest control, non toxic pest control, aphids, mealy bugs, scale, whitefly, hydrogen peroxide for plants, neem oil, treating plants for pests, plants, how to get rid of fungus gnats, fungus gnats

Id: uC_XGNjv7DA

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019