It looked like there's an alien invasion but this is nothing but an insect infestation on my bittermelon. ðŸ˜
I have seen aphids, crawling insects, spiders, and ants on some of my plants before and I knew how to deal with them right away. But this is is new to me. I didn't know what these were called. So I went ahead and did a random search of plant insects in the net. And I stumbled upon this and this.
So this explains why there were ants on my bittergourd plant. I have seen these ants for quite some time now and have been wondering what they're doing. Well, obviously they're feeding on something. And that something is the honeydew that these scale insects produce after feeding on the bittergourd's sap.
That explains qhy no matter how I spray water to these ants to spray them away, they keep coming back. I didn't know there was something else I needed to drive away.
So how do you drive these scale insects away?
The articles I found gave a lot of tips on hpw to deal with this infestation. Some tips involve the use of insecticides which I don't feel like doing. I'd like to keep it all natural. So here are the tips I followed.
Spray water on the scales. I used my plant spray bottle for this but set it to strong spray. So basically, I water gunned them to death. My tip though: Don't go berserk with the spray bottle water gun or it'll dage the already infested leaves. I'm so sorry leaves. I didn't mean to hurt you.
Put oil on the infected parts of your plant. The article said you should use horticultural oils or you may use the vegetable oil you have in your kitchen. I thought I knew better, I used tea tree oil. I shouldn't have. The leaves wilted. Once you've applied oil on the infected surfaces, you can then go ahead and scrape the scales off. But I get the creeps when I see swarms so I just went ahead and spray bottled them again. It was a lot easier this time because of the oil.
Prune the infested leaves and branches. If you see there aren't that much leaves affected by the infestation, the easy way would be to just cut them off the plant. This is much easier. I consider my plants lucky because the scales hasn't spread on the entire plant yet.
I love homesteading and I am loving the stuff I am learning in the process. I just hope these scales would never bother my bittermelon anymore. They're really challenging to grow already.