The weather this year has been problematic, last week we had temps upper 70's - mid 80s now we just dropped into the low 70's with night time temps in the upper 50's - low 60's. Yesterday I went out and found that more than half of my plants were covered in aphids and mites, I even had them on the mature arabicum leaves, which I've never had before. I spent over 3 hours spraying and picking off aphids yesterday and today some have more aphids on them then yesterday 🤬 I used soap water on them yesterday, I'm out of neem oil, I'm going for some in the morning, but the damage is pretty extensive.

Two days ago, I noticed the leaves on my favorite arabicum were getting a little pale, it was covered in hundreds of tiny red mites I needed a magnifying glass to see. So it got it's first ever leaf clipping and I sprayed it with soap water and then rinsed it off. You can see some of the damaged leaves on the plants behind it.


This one had it's first ever flower open yesterday, it looked fine, didn't have aphids, and then today I see this.


To be fair, the lower leaves on this one started to discolor several days back, I have sprayed it with soap a couple of times but hadn't seen mites or aphids, until yesterday when it was covered in aphids.


The new growth leaves on the top third of the plant were fine until yesterday.


I gave these arabicums a haircut about 3 weeks ago because they were stresses from some fungus issues earlier in the season. It got down in the 50's with night time temps dipping into the low 40's and upper 30's. I had them in my little greenhouse when it got under 50 but the plants were cold and damp for a long time and they got leaf spot. They were all recovering fine until the one in front was covered with aphids yesterday.


You can see the black dead aphid I didn't clear off the plant yesterday, the live ones were new today.


These leaves were fine 3 days ago.


I'm needing some help/advice/guidance on this. First, is this all insect damage? Second, should I skip the neem oil and go with an insecticide? Third, should I remove all effected leaves? Just the discolored ones and not the wrinkled ones? None of them?

I'm at a loss here, but around 50 of my 80 plants are already infested and I expect it will be more tomorrow 😒

On the up side, it's going to be sunny and in the low 80's with night time temps in the upper 60's for the next week, that should take care of the bulk of the aphids.

pinch off yellowing leaves or let them fall off ....I would skip insecticides and spray with insecticidal soap (neem oil is more for winter use - it works by smothering insects ..... spray both sides of every leaf, stem and caudex ....all the nooks and crannies ...spray to runoff

in a few hours the insecticidal soap will dry ....when *dry* the insecticidal soap is no longer effective ....rinse the powdery white soap residue off leaves to prevent possible leaf damage on hot days

most insects have *life stages*, some with 4, others with up to 6 .....these life cycles can range anywhere from a few hours to over a week ......assume all life stages are present at any one time..... repeat spray in 10 to 14 days, repeat a 3rd time....and if necessary, a 4th time to ensure the insect invasion is eradicated

Many thanks sir 🙂

My day got all ate up with other disasters but I'll be able to pick some up some insecticidal soap tonight, at least it's easy to come by and affordable. I'm hoping maybe that will kill whatever it is that eats little holes in my rudbeckia leaves as well, anyway, it can't hurt to try.

I'm seeing some entomological research in my future 😉

Insecticidal Soap - is safe for most plants, pets and people ....

make your own at a fraction of the cost

Will need:

a bottle of Dr Bronner's Unscented Pure-Castile Liquid Soap when done spraying plants, you can wash your hands with this stuff

https://www.drbronner.com/prod...

a sprayer - a 1 quart hand-pump spray bottle works great

Mix 1 tablespoon of Dr Bronner's Castile soap in 1 quart of water, or 5 tablespoons in 1 gallon of water

Sure, now you tell me 😛

I picked up a bottle of insecticidal soap earlier tonight but when this stuff runs out I'll definitely get some castile soap. I have a 56oz hand pump sprayer with the ounces marked out on the side that I have been using for spraying fungicide and keeping my seedlings watered. In fact I'll dump the insecticidal soap I bought in that instead of using the cheesy trigger sprayer it came in 😉

I do appreciate the information though, thanks 🙂

I bought a 16oz bottle of insecticidal soap, when I dumped it in the sprayer bottle it wasn't even 16oz. I set the sprayer nozzel as fine as it would go and it only covered my 20 smallest plants and 5 of the arabicums with no leaves, I've got around 50 more large plants, many with lots of leaves left. I'm definitely going to have to pick up some castile soap tonight, based on what that covered I'm guessing I'll need close to gallon to finish up my plants.

Walmart sells their knockoff - www.walmart.com/ip/Dr-Natural-Castile-Liquid-Soap-Unscented-Baby-Mild-32-oz-Soap/814644985 - for $6 dollars less than the dr bronner, from what I can see the only difference is a tiny amount of shea butter and that stuff has 5 different fatty acids in it. The fatty acids are what is doing the work based on what I've read. They dissolve the exoskeletons on the bugs and open their cells up so they just dry out and die 💀
We're in the hottest part of the day right now, I'll wait a couple of hours and go rinse off the ones that I sprayed earlier. Hopefully this will have my plants on the road to recovery quickly

Apparently I still can't post offsite links 🙄

Kyle, what happens if you use the bbcodes for [url] and sandwich the link with some text between? Will that work?

depending on what is infesting my plants....I can easily spray a gallon worth of mixed Dr Bronner's in my pump sprayer ....making sure i get over-spray an nearby plants

oh yeah ...before spraying, look over plants for lady bugs and lady bug larvae, they consume aphids and scale, Insecticidal Soap will kill them and lace wings too

My biggest problems are the oleander caterpillars! they used to just eat the leaves, now they chomp on the blooms and seedlings too! What a disaster!

And I don't know how to get rid of them!

GigiAdeniumPlumeria said: My biggest problems are the oleander caterpillars! they used to just eat the leaves, now they chomp on the blooms and seedlings too! What a disaster!

And I don't know how to get rid of them!

might not want to eradicate oleander caterpillars ....somewhere in the Adenium literature oleander moths are listed as a possible Adenium pollinator

caterpillars can be plucked off and stomped on or simply plucked off and moved to someone else's yard .....plants can also be sprayed with a "natural" control called Thuricide -....only thing is, not sure if it is safe to use on adenium

Okay, I suspect it pollinates my desert roses but it also deposits 100s (at least it seems like it) of hungry baby caterpillars.

If those are the black moths with orange wings that look kinda like a wasp, we have a lot of them this year. Maybe that's where my aphids are coming from

I finally finished spraying my plants tonight but didn't have enough daylight for the rinse cycle, that will happen tomorrow morning, after which, I shall have the cleanest adeniums in all the land 😛

All joking aside, I am hoping this will do the trick, it sucks to have 30+ plants with buds and not a single flower to show for it. It did give me a chance to look all my plants over closely and I can report that they are all actually quite healthy. Even the the arabicum with the quarter sized 2" inch deep hole in the side from the rotten branch I removed this spring. It still looks pretty severe, but the hole is starting to scar over on the inside and the caudex is hard as a rock all around it 🙂

I had 6 plants with spider mites, 3 of them had pretty extensive webs, and a dozen plants with what I believe are springtails? It almost looks like black dirt splashed up by the rain but its in places that dirt from the pots couldn't possible splash up to naturally. all but 3 of those were in 8" pots on the pavers in the yard, basically on the ground. I used just over 2 gallons of the the castile soap mix that @deepsouth told me about, which saved me about $40 dollars in store bought products, thank you for that tip 😁

Also, several of my obesums are developing cool looking caudices, and half or more of all the plants really need to be up-potted as soon as I can get it done.

I'll keep a close eye on everything, spray down any thing freshly infested, and re-spray all of them in a week to ten days.

Today I found 3 plants with aphids on them, I was actually expecting more, there are a lot of tight spaces on plants that are hard to see, much less spray. You can see the newly arrived aphids on the leaves on the right, the black ones are the ones the spray killed, the majority of the plants looked like this, just loaded with aphids. After rinsing about 50 plants I gave up on clearing off the all the aphid corpses, I figured I'd let them be a warning to their friends 😛

For aphids, I just use wet paper towels and wipe the leaves or blooms. They come off easy. And they will leave your desert roses alone.

This is the moth that produces oleander caterpillars.

That's actually pretty though. They need some strong encouragement to go elsewhere and lay eggs. If only it were that easy...

Maybe I will buy a real oleander plants for them to devour. My neighbor used to have a big one and always full of caterpillars.

What we've got a bunch of this year are these:


Which I see are also spotted oleander moths, the wings are brighter orange on ours though. I haven't seen any of the caterpillars, then again, I haven't been looking for them. I will be now though 😉

They're pretty too, it's a shame when they're pretty and destructive, I'm always torn what to do, if anything, about them.