If your plants have a formidable enemy, it’s mealybugs. Mealybugs, white or shelled, are parasites that attack the leaves and stems of your plants, preventing them from developing properly. Find out how to eradicate mealybugs with Marseille soap and white vinegar.
Mealybugs are pests that can attack your indoor green plants, but also garden plants, shrubs and fruit trees in your orchard, thus harming their good growth.
Under what conditions do mealybugs develop?
Scale insects love humidity and warmth. So if you mist your plant’s foliage too much or if your interior suffers from humidity or lack of ventilation, you run the risk of finding mealybugs on your plant.
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Mealybugs are also common in spring or summer, even on garden plants, when temperatures are high and outside air humidity is higher.
What are the consequences for the plant?
Mealybugs are found inside leaves or on young shoots. It is the female mealybugs that attack plants. In fact, while male mealybugs have wings, females are immobile. They therefore live attached to the plant where they lay their eggs.
These insects are stinging and sucking insects that feed on plant sap. By pumping out their sap, scale insects weaken the plant and hinder its growth. Added to this is the risk that the plant develops a black deposit that looks like soot, called sooty mold. In fact, scale insects secrete honeydew, a sweet depressant, which attracts fungi, but also different species of ants. This disease caused by fungi is also dangerous for plants, because the black deposit that covers the foliage blocks the photosynthesis of their vegetation.
Scale insects are also harmful to fruit trees. In addition to destroying the harvest, they risk ruining the vegetation.
mealybug infestation
How to eradicate mealybugs?
White vinegar and black soap
Put water in a spray bottle and add a teaspoon of liquid black soap and a teaspoon of white vinegar. Then spray on the infected parts of your plant, morning and evening. Avoid using this natural insecticide on your plant in the middle of the day, so as not to burn it with the sun. Repeat this operation daily until the scale insects are completely eradicated. Note that white vinegar is also effective against aphids and bindweed.
Marseille soap
