Aphids in the House-Now What?

Aphids in the House-Now What?

Published by Mark Schultz on Dec 3rd 2020

My Thursday Thought this week turns to a serious problem for our indoor tabletop garden beds-APHIDS!
We rely on our GardenStream bottom watering planters to provide us with absolutely fresh and delicious microgreens, herbs, and lettuce throughout the winter. Once experienced, a winter tabletop garden is something that becomes a necessity, to make winter a delightful culinary and gardening experience. They sure make winter much more enjoyable, that's for sure.
This fall, though, I let my guard down, and brought in 4 planters, filled with basil, lettuce, cilantro, and  parsley, which had been started outdoors. We have had so little experience with aphids in the house that it just did not occur to me that this was a big mistake.
Several years ago, we had an aphid infestation in one of the hoop houses, which started with some nursery-bought pepper plants. Aphids soon coated the undersides of all of our pepper plants. It took a few applications of Neem insecticidal soap, sprayed on the bottoms of all of the leaves, to knock the aphids back to manageable levels. It was a real pain, and the soap was very hard on the plants. I vowed to never again bring plants into the hoop houses from elsewhere.
We will never again bring plants into the house from outdoors, either (except for Peg's Christmas cactus). From now on, we will only start our indoor garden after a few killing freezes outside, and we are no longer leaving any windows open.
This next video explains how we are dealing with the latest crisis, and also hits on how we are controlling fungus gnats, which are are of an annoyance than a scourge, like aphids.

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