I mentioned in a previous post yesterday that the weather this past weekend was just fantastic and we were therefore outside inspecting…which is how we came up with our daunting tasks for the weekend. What I didn’t mention was that while we were outside checking out all the plants, we realized that our roses are full of aphids. It’s of course just the right time of year for them since everything is budding but since we are not experienced gardeners, we are relying very heavily on the Internet, friends and family so we don’t mess anything up lol. Trial by fire, basically.
Because it was Sunday, we couldn’t go out and buy anything to treat them so we started looking for home remedies. We found two: boiling tobacco in water until all the chemicals are in the water and then spray that on the plants…or try essentially the same thing but with black tea. We had both tobacco and tea on hand but we figured we’d go for the stronger method of tobacco. It did work to some degree but I think there weren’t enough toxins to go around. Perhaps if we’d sprayed them another time or two it would have worked out really well but we resorted to buying chemicals instead. Yesterday I picked up a spray that is specifically for aphids so hopefully that will do the trick…and there are several other products if they keep hanging on. There are also little sticks which you can plant around your plants to prevent the aphids from coming back but we have to get rid of them first…and we’re a bit concerned that the dog might end up digging them up (she goes through little spurts where she feels the need to dig in the flower beds) and perhaps eat them so hopefully the spray alone will be successful. I plan on tackling them later today when it warms up a bit (it’s only about 34 degrees right now).
