Plant Clinic Ep 3: Identifying and Eradicating Houseplant Pests

hi everyone welcome back to my channel and welcome back to my series plant clinic I'm so excited to be bringing you in this episode because I have truly been working on this and researching for weeks just to get all the right information so that this video can be as helpful as possible and be jam-packed with as much information as possible if we haven't met yet my name is Becca and this is my youtube channel where I talk about all the houseplant things in my series plant clinic I tackle a plant issue whether it be one specific issue or just a variety of issues and I make a video about it and help you guys troubleshoot through the problems that we experience with our plants I will say now that I only take entries for this series whenever I ask for them so I do not accept entries to my DMS if I haven't asked because sometimes I will be doing something very specific and I don't want to include something super random in a video about pests like this one and one last thing before we get into it I wanted to thank you guys for your contributions on this video I definitely could not have done this without you because I needed good photos of these pests and I also needed to know how you get rid of them because admittedly I haven't had every plant pest Under the Sun but I have had a few of them so a lot of this will be from your guys's experiences and research that I have done so I hope that with all this collective knowledge you will find this video very helpful and you can refer back to it whenever you have an issue or you think that you have a pest with that being said I am going to have timestamps in the description box below so that you know where to jump around in the video if there's something very specific that you're looking for or if you just want to come back to this later on and get information about thrips or spider mites specifically and you don't need to hear me chatting about anything else those time stamps are in the description box below for your use so the first question I'm going to answer is where do pass from and the answers a little bit tricky because whenever we are out plan shopping it's super important that we are checking the plant for a pest as we're shopping and we're not bringing into our home a infested plant I mean of course if you know it's infested in you're okay with that that's one thing but if you're just out shopping and you have no idea and then you put it with all of your other plants you're really really going to increase the likelihood of you bringing a pest into your home unknowingly so that is one way that pests get in new plants another way that pests can get into your home is through cracks in your windows or your door things like that and another way that they get in is through potting soil so this happens especially with fungus snacks I won't be talking about fungus gnats in this video because I've already made an in-depth video about fungus gnats it's a very popular video people really like it so if you want to know more about how to get rid of fungus gnats you can check up in the box right here I'll have it on the screen but with that being said a lot of other pests can also come in in your potting soil hidden in there so there's a lot of ways to sanitize your soil before you use it and just make sure that there are no pests in the soil additionally if you do bring home a plant that looks pest free there could be pests on it just in the egg stage naturally pests have a life cycle so the better that you understand that life cycle the better you will be able to fight them off when you find them so let's say you find spider mites on your plant and you have eradicated them but then a couple days later or a week later you notice them back well that's because you didn't kill the larvae and the eggs so the spider mites laid eggs and then they hatched and now you have a new colony of spider mites on your plant so this means that when you treat your plants for pests you need to do it consistently on a schedule that is maybe similar to the pests life cycle if you do suspect that your plant has a pest it's really important that you check around that new growth pest really like to congregate around new growth and sometimes you will notice that new growth is disfigured or wrong in some way and if it feels like it's wrong it probably is they also really like to hang around the petioles basically where the leaf meets the stem it's a really really popular spot for them to hang out so what I have done in the past when I have treated for really any kind of pest I spray down the plant with whatever I'm spraying it down with for three days straight wait five days and then spray it again for three more days and when I have consistently stayed with that schedule of eliminating the pests they stay away for good and this isn't to say that I won't get a pest on a plant again in a few months but it won't be from that same cycle something else to consider is because our homes are a comfortable temperature for humans and animals they are probably a comfortable temperature for bugs as well so those pests are able to lay eggs year-round because it doesn't freeze in our homes and get super cold for them so this is a great place for them to live year-round as far as treatment goes for these pests and eradicating them from your home there are three ways to do so and throughout this video I will be sharing those three methods for each individual pest and those three ways are home remedies which is using things that you will probably have around your house like rubbing alcohol and dish soap number 2 store-bought remedies which will include lots of different mixtures sometimes chemical mixtures that you can purchase from garden centers and stores and number 3 is beneficial insects there definitely are insects out there that are beneficial that will eat the bad insects and if you do feel comfortable releasing them in your home that is a really great way to combat these insects that are trying to kill your plants how you choose to treat your plants is really up to you and your personal preference I personally really like to stick to more of the natural remedies although I've never tried beneficial insects I will be sharing with you what other people said and their experiences it really just depends on the scale that you are growing your plants if you are growing in a greenhouse and you are having consistent outbreaks you're probably going to start using a systemic insecticide a lot of the home remedies can sometimes be tedious whereas a store-bought remedy is just a spray and that's all so it really is down to personal preference and how many plants you are treating at a time I asked everybody if they have ever had a pest on a plant and now not every single person that follows me responded but quite a few did about 1097 people said that they have how to pest on a plant and 153 people said that they haven't so a couple months ago I would have said that I have never had a pest on a plant but the reason that I said that was because I didn't know what to look for so this video is meant for you everyone who says they've never had a pest on their plant because chances are you have and you probably just didn't notice and the next question I asked is did the plants survive 889 people said yes and 158 people said no so that is also another point of this video is to help that yes be a much bigger number and that no be a much smaller number so if we do have the knowledge to combat these insects I really believe that we will be successful almost every time sometimes it's out of our control but I really feel like a lot of the time we can nip it in the bud as long as we catch it early and the last question I asked just for fun is which pest are you the most afraid of and by far everybody said they are most afraid of spider mites so I do have a separate video that I made about spider mites it is not by any means this type of video but I will link that up in the cards if you want to hear more about my experience with spider mites I've already told you a few times that I have a lot of experiences with them so if you want to hear my first ever experience noticing that I had them in my house you can definitely watch that video and I think you might enjoy it the first pest we are going to be talking about is the aphid so the aphid is a soft bodied insect and a lot of people said that you could just squish them with your fingers and make it birth to live insects they typically do not fly but they can so the first method we're going to talk about to get rid of aphids is our home remedies so a lot of people surprisingly enough just suggested power washing your plant and blasting it with water a few days in a row since the aphids are a little bit bigger you can see them pretty well and they also get knocked off the plant if you just power wash them off so after you power wash the plant you can make a mixture of dish soap and water and spray it all over the plant maybe a few times you power wash it just to make sure there's no leftovers going on there the dish soap will kill them another mixture that you can make is dish soap with rubbing alcohol and water and another really great one is pouring hydrogen peroxide diluted with water into the soil mat will definitely kill anything that is living in the soil which is something that I do for fungus gnats and it is extremely effective so it makes sense that it is also effective for other types of pests but thankfully they are easier to see and they do congregate together so that makes it a lot easier to see them as well now onto the store-bought methods for preventing and killing aphids I'm just going to rattle off my list here I have it written down here so we have tea tree oil soap and neem oil so neem oil is one that you're going to hear a lot and also tea tree oil is a really great natural remedy I kind of want to put that in the home remedies but I'm not sure if everybody keeps tea tree oil but if you do that's a really great insect repellent as well captain's jack dead bug brew this is one that came up for just about every pest and it's something that I'm very interested in purchasing myself I have a different tried-and-true product that I use that I'll be talking about later on but this captain's jack dead bug brew is one that everybody said was their tried and true so I definitely will be trying that one out another suggestion was using spinosad which is a chemical mixture that is honestly really helpful for a lot of different kinds of pests a fits included another really popular suggestion was diatomaceous earth which is basically crushed up diatoms which is a single-cell algae this product has also been recommended to me for fungus gnats a lot of times so it definitely is really effective for a lot of people and the last category for removal of aphids is predatorial or beneficial insects probably the most common and honestly naturally occurring insect for removing aphids is ladybugs or ladybug larva board green lace wings I've heard a lot of really great things about both of these the next pest we're going to talk about is strip strip are probably one of the bugs that scare me the most just because they seem to be really really violent with our plants I feel like the effects of threat is so so heavy and very very obvious when a plant has thrip you can really easily tell that has a bunch of different dots and almost like punctures all over the leaf and sometimes it can even take on a bluish hue the actual thrip insect itself is quite small but it is a little bit more visible to the human eye than others oftentimes they look like wood shavings on top of the plant so definitely if you see anything like that it's not a good situation we don't have as many home remedies for thrip probably because this pest is very very aggressive and honestly if I knew that a plant of mine hugs rip I would immediately go to chemical just because I know how hard they are to get rid of and I don't know I guess for some people they're not as scary but I think that I have had a plant with red before and even just the thought of it having thrip made me throw it away which I don't want to do in the future now that I have all this information but it was really scary so I'm going to read off some suggestions from you guys the first one here is rotted nettle tea and with that make sure you wash the leaves and also water in the soil I have no idea what nettle tea is I don't think that this is something that we drink where I live but if you I don't know I should do more research about that one but the next one is an alcohol and soap mixture so rubbing alcohol and dish soap and water is a really great one for this one too that's pretty much a very general pest management trick to always have on hand we should always have those things on hand anyway so it just makes it really easy to mix up a bottle of that and have it on hand so that you are always ready if you find something and in the last home remedy which is a little bit more of a per minute 'iv is to make sure that that plant has a lot of humidity certain plans definitely do need humidity and when they are in low humidity situations I don't know what it is but it makes them so much more susceptible to pests I think maybe they put out some sort of wavelength there in distress and those really harmful pests send if someone can explain this in the comments down below that would be really helpful for us but it does seem that those plants that are in distress will likely get the pests rather than someone who is in their optimal condition and the most healthy that they could possibly be so if you do notice that you have thrips some people suggested putting the plant like in a bag to make it a really really humid environment because thrip really don't like that and neither do spider mites or our store-bought mixtures we have Spina sat again which is a chemical mixture for a lot of different kinds of pests we have neem oil and bonide systemic we have the Captain Jack's dead bug brew that's a mouthful Captain Jack's dead bug brew and something that I found really interesting when I was researching online is thrip are attracted to the color blue whereas you know other pests we have heard of like fungus gnats and things like that are attracted to the color yellow that's why there are yellow sticky traps but I saw online that there are blue sticky traps for thrip and I actually found a product on Amazon and I was looking at the reviews and a lot of people said that it doesn't work at all and some people said that it really does so if you have a pretty bad infestation it might not be a bad thing to try that out if you are kind of running out of options and just need to kill them off because really it is important to target the insect at all stages of its life so the adult and the larvae and the eggs you know depending on the the way that the bug reproduces but getting those adults is really important too because usually for every day that they're alive these bugs are laying more eggs and making the problem even bigger and go on for even longer so definitely make sure that you are thinking about these pests and all stages of their lives just like I said earlier in the video we need to understand their life cycle so that we can comeback them the best and I think for each individual pests you have to take into consideration how they lay their eggs if they even lay eggs how long it takes for them to hatch all of these things now I'm not familiar with either of these two insects for the predatorial insect options for thrip but the two suggest that I saw were thrip predators and minute pirate bugs are probably my new pirate bugs geez again I haven't heard of either of these two things I would definitely suggest doing more research about it if you are interested in predatorial insects for thrips the next press we're going to talk about is scale scale is a pest that can go undercover for a long time and not really be noticed just because they can oftentimes look like they are a part of the plant itself the most common form of scale is the brown scale which is really unfortunate because a lot of the stems on our plants are brown so that's how they kind of blend in and also they kind of armor themselves up so they have a hard outer shell and underneath that they are just going at it killing your plan doing their best to take out all the nutrients and all the goodness from your plant so with that being said they can go undetected because they look like they're a part of your plant so you really have to look carefully whenever you see bumps along the stems of your plants or even along the leaves when scale is young it does have legs and can move around but as it grows older and it matures it will find a spot on your plant and just plant itself there and not leave until you physically scrape it off and when I say until you scrape it off you literally have to scrape off this bug because of the armor that they have for themselves if you spray something on the plant it's not going to infiltrate there the seal that they have created on the plant because they have it all sectioned up right it just it's very strange but when you think about it like that's very cool if it was anything other than my plant I'd be like that's pretty cool that you guys can do that but since it's our plants it's not that cool so our home remedies for treating scale is to get a fingernail and scrape it off some people might be uneasy to touch the pest with your fingernails and scrape off that way but it is a little bit easier for leverage and you know really how much pressure is being applied so that you're not hurting the plant more than it already was hurting you can't also use a toothpick or something with a char and but I don't know a lot of people said that their fingernails was probably the easiest way to get them off once you have removed the scale make sure that they are not falling into the soil and once you're finished physically removing all of them give the plant a nice spray down with some rubbing alcohol dish soap and water as far as store-bought mixtures goes this does not change the fact that you need to scrape them off with your fingers but some store-bought remedies for after you remove them and for like spraying and stuff we have insecticidal soap diluted soap and neem oil you know both of these are coming up a lot and then Captain Jack's dead bug broom so it seems as though if you buy a lot of these products they are multifaceted so you're getting a little bit more bang for your buck all right we're going to move on to mealybugs Millie bugs are a pest that I have dealt with before and honestly they are the least scary to me because they're really really easy to see and really really easy to remove so I have had them before on my hoya compacta which is a plant that you definitely don't want to have that on but when I did find it I found it because I was actually looking at a bloom so I was looking really closely at the plant and at that time it looked pretty mature so I have no idea how long it was there or if there were others along with it but I only found one single mealy bug and I have been checking the plant consistently ever since I found that and I haven't found any more mealy bugs are a small very visible to the human eye white fuzzy insect they are soft bodied so you can squish them or you can remove them just topically you don't need to scrape them off according to my research online they do multiply really really fast and they lay eggs in what looks like little cotton mounds it kind of just looks like cotton and then the eggs are somewhere in there so I have found that on a plant before and I got rid of that pretty quickly as well and even though they are really easy to see they do tend to hide in little crevices of plants so definitely make sure that if you feel like you spotted a mealy bug you are searching the entire plant really really well because like I said I have found just one before and no others but I don't know where it came from I didn't introduce any new plants in that area so it's just a little bit confusing so since that happened I have been a little bit more vigilant checking that plant almost every day and power-washing it really good whenever I do water that plant so some home remedies for treating mealy bug is a q-tip and rubbing alcohol this is exactly what I use and they die instantaneously like on the spot this one that I found as soon as I poked it with the rubbing alcohol it's almost as if it like opened and there was like blood on the q-tip it was very strange but that definitely will kill them on impact and another great recommendation that I got from you guys is to use castile soap on mealybugs as well castile soap is also a great mixture for cleaning off your leaves just an extra tip and then for store-bought mixtures we have again neem oil and secta sidle soap after you remove them and thieves which is an essential oil kind of like tea tree oil but it's different it's often used with like cleaning your home and things like that if you are wanting to go the predatorial insect route for melee bugs I would suggest green lacewing so that seems to be the bug that would take care of a lot of different things so maybe if you just release those in your home they can take care of a lot of different things at once maybe things that you didn't even know you had I would say that mealy bugs are probably the most simple but they do multiply fast so you have to catch it early and be really diligent about removing them ASAP the next pest we're going to quickly go through is white fly so a few years ago I grew a flowering plant from seed and I noticed that there were a bunch of little white flies all over it and I wasn't sure what it is but by the time I noticed the plant was long gone so I didn't realize that that was white fly until very recently so that just really sucks but anyway let's talk about white fly so why fly is exactly what it sounds like it is a white fly so they are very visible and they do fly I'm saying fly so many times also they are a type of a fit the removal of white fly is very very similar to a fits so block them with water maybe spray them with insecticidal soap or an alcohol mixture after you're finished with that another suggestion was using those yellow sticky traps and also predatorial insects like green lace wings and lani bug larva and lastly the most feared pest for our houseplants the spider mite now obviously based on its name the spider mite is not actually an insect but it is rather a mite and it gets the name spider mite probably from the fact that it creates webs and with that they probably travel along the webs and lay their eggs in them they are very difficult to see to the naked eye but you can very easily see the effects of them with their webbing and also you can very easily see the eggs and just the residue that they leave behind on a plant so for our home remedies on spider mines a good power wash to those leaves make sure that you're getting off the adults if they're already there and maybe damaging some of those webs and also creating a mixture of dish soap rubbing alcohol and water and spraying that on those leaves if you saw my spider mites video you saw that I used a toothbrush to scrub along the veins of the leaf and things like that and that was super effective but it was extremely time-consuming and I would suggest if you are going to do something intensive like that to wear some sort of mask while you do it because the smell was very strong and it gave me a super bad migraine if I have one or two plants with spider mites at a time then it's definitely something that I still do because it is so super effective but if I find multiples with spider mites which has happened since I put out that video I started using a spray called eight eight is a chemical insecticide so I am careful with how I use it but it is so extremely effective and the moment I use it just even one time I don't see spider mites again so it is definitely a really really great way that I have found to get rid of pests I would also suggest of course the Captain Jack dead bug Bru or just a general systemic insecticide if you are wanting to go the predatorial insect route I would definitely suggest green lace wings I've heard a lot of really wonderful things about green lace wings and spider mites all right you guys we have finally finished this episode of plant clinic the very very long-awaited episode about pest I really really hope that this was helpful for you and you found some valuable information this video by no means covers every little thing about each of these pests but I do hope that they can serve as a guide to simplify taking care of these pests maybe demystify it a little bit and give you some hope that you don't need to throw away a plant at the moment that you find out that there's a pest on it a lot of these pests can be taken care of with home remedies but I would say if you are having consistent issues don't be afraid to jump over to a store-bought make sure like the ones that I mentioned in this video today if you have any extra insight that you would like to add about any one of these pests I would so so appreciate it if you would leave it down in the comments below I would love for this video to become a resource beyond me there's only so much research that I could have done but I know that you guys have a lot of knowledge in your minds about these pests and I would love if you would share them down below I also think that it's important to note that a lot of these store-bought mixtures and possibly even home remedies could also have a negative effect on beneficial insects like pollinators so definitely be careful if you are going to be using any of these mixtures outside and be aware of what is around you so that we aren't affecting our pollinators thank you guys so much for your patience and support on this episode of plant clinic if you have an idea for another episode of plant clinic a subject you would like to explore with me leave it in the comments down below as well so that I know when I can start researching next and with all of that being said thank you so much for watching thank you for subscribing to my channel if you are not already subscribed definitely hit that subscribe button and join the fam doing the day lapham I would love to have you here for more videos and I will see you guys in the next one bye another really popular suggestion was dial diatomaceous diatomaceous that matrice earth diametric diam tamesha's grantmakers diatomaceous diatomaceous diatomaceous diatomaceous diatomaceous tile tenacious [Music]

Channel: Becca De La Plants

Views: 31,191

Rating: 4.9463868 out of 5

Keywords: plant clinic, delaplants, how to get rid of aphids, how to get rid of spidermites, how to get rid of thrips, how to get rid of mealybugs, how to get rid of whitefly, how to get rid of scale, scale, mealybugs, spidermites, thrips, aphids, whitefly, becca de la plants

Id: nZAYrW4QTBc

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020