January 30, 2005
APHIDS? IN JANUARY?!? TIPS FOR DEALING WITH INDOOR PLANT PESTS
I have two Firecracker Pequin plants indoors this winter, both in 8” pots and both grown to about 2 feet high. They get a lot of southern exposure light, and up until recently had both been flourishing. The first of the two is a little over three years old and is one of the oldest chile plants I have. The second is a baby, a plant that I started just this past spring, had outdoors all summer, and just couldn’t bear to part with come Fall. Why not? Because Firecracker Pequins are a great winter chile plant. They bloom and fruit all winter long, and the way they ripen – from purple to albino to yellow to orange to red – means that you have a very colorful houseplant. Just give the main trunk of the plant a gentle shake every once in a while to pollinate your blooms, and you’ll be guaranteed a generous supply of hot, thumbnail sized pods all year round. And on a culinary note, it’s a very nice thing when you’re making Texas Chili in the dead of winter to be able to walk over to your Pequin plant and snip a dozen fresh pods off to give your chili that naturally smokey flavor and heat that Firecracker Pequins are good for.
About two weeks ago I noticed that my older plant was losing a lot of its leaves. On closer examination, I was confronted with the bane of every gardener’s existence: aphids. It's not that aphids are hard to kill. Its that they’re hard to eradicate. You need to get every single bug and every single egg on the entire plant… or before you know it that plant will be completely infested again.
The Magical Mystery Potion to assure complete aphid destruction? Biodegradable dish soap. Seriously. That very same stuff you probably have next to your kitchen sink right this moment. Here’s how you use it: take a normal spray water bottle, put two teaspoons of dish soap in the bottle the fill the bottle with water. Take the infested plant into the bath tub, and just spray it down with the soapy solution. Make sure you spray every nook and cranny of that plant, hold the plant up and spray from underneath as well to get the underside of the leaves. This solution will have no impact at all on the edibility of the chiles. You can even apply this spray right up until the moment you harvest (just make sure you wash the soap off the chiles before you eat them, or you’ll look like you have rabies after you eat them…). Let the plant drip dry in the tub. Repeat this process 3-4 days later just to be sure you got ALL OF THEM. And, of course, repeat if these little white annoyances reappear.
One last note on spraying for aphids: don’t put your plants immediately back into direct sunlight when they’re wet with this soapy solution. Better to do this spray down at night, whether they’re indoors or outdoors.
|
ITEMS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE:
|
