Field Notes

If there are ants going up and down the stem of a plant with aphids on it, they are not there by coincidence and they are not there for a look. They are farming, and they will defend the herd against anything you release.

Root aphids are a different pest with a different answer, and the honest version of that answer is thinner than the product labels across this industry suggest. Here is what you are looking at, how to be sure, and what has actually been tested.

Most aphid advice treats aphids as one pest. The parasitoid wasps do not. One of them will sting a potato aphid and be unable to develop inside it, which looks exactly like a release that did nothing. Here is how to tell which one you have.

Aphid numbers do not behave like insect numbers. A female gives birth to live daughters without mating, and those daughters already contain their own daughters before they are born. Everything else about aphids follows from that one fact.

Ladybugs, lacewing larvae, Aphidius wasps and Aphidoletes midges are not four strengths of the same thing. Three of them arrive, work and are finished. One of them leaves a next generation inside the colony, which is the difference that decides most cases.

A week after a ladybug release most of the beetles are gone and something else is on the leaves: small, dark, spiky, moving with purpose. People spray them. They are the part of the release that cannot fly away, and they do most of the eating.

A light sprinkle of ladybugs over an infested plant is the standard advice and it is not close to the rate that has been shown to work. In the one peer-reviewed garden trial, single releases at the recommended rate did nothing measurable. Here is the number that did something.

Go looking for an OMRI seal on a tube of predatory mites and you will not find one — on ours or on anybody's. The usual explanation is that you cannot certify something alive, and that explanation is wrong. Releasing beneficials is a practice rather than an input, and a practice has nothing in it for anyone to review.

Not on the underside — inside it. Which means that when you sprayed, a large share of the thrips on that plant were sealed in plant tissue or sitting in the potting mix, where nothing applied to a leaf goes. They were never killed, and they arrived on schedule.