Aphid control with ladybugs
Posted on Jul 01, 2009 under Gardening | 1 Comment
A little while ago our potato plants where infested with aphids. Trying to combat them without the use of pesticides, we went out looking for ladybugs. Our search wasn’t too successful, we only found about half a dozen of them and released them in the greenhouse. Placed on the infested plants you could immediately see them start to feast on the aphids. Happy to have found Cockaigne, they soon started to lay eggs. About a week later the potato plants where full of ladybug larvae all happily eating and growing.
With each larva eating over 30 aphids a day, our potato plants where soon freed of those unwelcome guests. The larvae had done such a good job, that the last ones that hadn’t gone into pupa stage yet, had to turn on their siblings.
The hatched adults flew out through the greenhouse roof vents to control aphids elsewhere.
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August 17th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Hi, great post on using ladybugs to control aphids. We often forget that there are environmentally sound alternatives to using harsh chemical pesticides. And in many cases, these alternatives, in this case – ladybugs, do a better job!