Aphids and Ant problem

[Francis Barnswallow]

Aphids keep appearing on my zuc plant and then the ants soon follow. Every day I have to spray organic soap to kill both of these pests. It works, but only for a few hours.....then they return.

How can I put a stop to this? They took out my highly productive cuc plant and now their starting to destroy the zuc plant.

[applestar]

Personally, I like this solution:
[img]https://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll272/applesbucket/Image8544.jpg[/img]

You can see the yellow aphids covering the leaf in the background. In the foreground, majority of the aphids have been mummified by the Aphid Mummy Maker wasps and have the oddly bloated dried up tan look to them.

I don't spray these milkweeds because they are for The Monarch butterflies to lay eggs on. Downside is that some of the mummy makers also parasitize the Monarch eggs so I have to collect the eggs as soon as they are laid and rise them indoors.

[orgoveg]

I had aphids all over my grape vine with ants farming them. I used my garlic/pepper spray and it killed them. They haven't been back. I didn't know garlic and pepper could kill aphids but it did!

[Fig3825]

I had an aphid infestation on my snow peas early on. I killed every stinkin' one of them and I killed my snow peas as well. Offender - STRONG garlic pepper spray....too strong...

[orgoveg]

I had an aphid infestation on my snow peas early on. I killed every stinkin' one of them and I killed my snow peas as well. Offender - STRONG garlic pepper spray....too strong...

Ooh, boy. I guess you have to be careful with that stuff, huh? Glad you said so.

[Francis Barnswallow]

I sprayed ant death around the area of the plants and so far it's working. I have a few more questions, what exactly are aphids? I have these plants in a screened in area. How did they get in?

[!potatoes!]

aphids:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid


anyone have ideas for this one?:

some of my yacon plants have acanthomyops ants (yellow, completely subterranean ants that smell of citronella [you may have come across these while digging]), farming fat white aphids on the underground portions of the stems. pretty hard to spray anything there. ideas?

[BP]

I have an Anaheim pepper plant that had aphids. I caught it early and used a pyrethrin based spray. It worked on the aphids, but the plant dropped quite a few blossoms too.

[applestar]

@!potatoes! -- beneficial nematodes?

[DoubleDogFarm]

Downside is that some of the mummy makers also parasitize the Monarch eggs so I have to collect the eggs as soon as they are laid and rise them indoors.

have to?

Eric