Thursday, May 19, 2011

Found some orange bugs on my tomato plants. well more precisely they are orange insects with black legs and small black spots on their abdomen. And to be even more precise they are called a leaf-footed bug, which is the nymph stage of the... stink bug found here (fig J and K). I've seen the adult guys around but did not know these were the juvenile form. See, you learn something new every day. Anyway, here is one survivor after i killed the majority of them.

Update: found out later that these bugs cause Cloudy Spot on tomato plants. see this post

And how did i take them out? same way i take everything out, with a spray bottle of diluted dish soap. That stuff kills every bug i've encountered yet. And the way i figure it is that i wash my dishes and my food off with it so i think i'm gonna be alright spraying it on and rinsing it off. 


So how did the Okra fare against the diluted soap treatment? It looks like the spray just seemed to more clearly define where the aphid damage was. I don't know that it did any extra damage really... I didn't look on the underside of those leaves for a while so the aphids got pretty densely populated and did a bit of damage. I'm mindful to hose them off now every time i water.

2 comments:

  1. i hope this works i was scared my plants were going to die!!!

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  2. it didn't work this year actually. It killed the bugs that were there but did NOT prevent new ones from coming in and taking their place.

    There has been a SERIOUS influx around my house this year and the spray didn't really help that much.If you have any tall brush where they can breed make sure to clear it all out. There's a slew of traps out there you may want to try too. I'm going to put a thin mesh net over them next season until i figure out if it's going to be as bad as it was this year!!! I had to pull all of mine up b/c even though they ripened and I had a ton of them, they just looked very unappealing and even I wouldn't eat them :(

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