A mild winter is good for pests like aphids. With rising temperatures, the louse can become a nuisance. What hobby gardeners can do.
Neustadt / Weinstrasse - This winter was harmless in most places - this is good for aphids and bad for hobby gardeners. Normally Frost kills the lice, but now there is an early and violent plague in the new garden year.
But sometimes you have to take a closer look: The Rhineland-Palatinate Garden Academy explains that you can spot numerous aphids on many plants, but often not on their green neighbors. This is due to the specialization of most louse species on certain plants. The garden academy gives an overview online.
The reason for the particularly early and violent plague that now threatens many places * is the mild winter. As a result, the natural life cycle did not come to an end this year.
Adult animals survived the winter
In late summer, most aphids migrate to their winter host plants and produce so-called winter eggs there. In comparison to normal egg production during the year, there are fewer, but these eggs survive even hard frosts. They are the basis for the new population next year. The adult animals, on the other hand, die in normal, cold winters.
If there are no longer periods of frost, the adults can survive - and multiply early next spring, in addition to the first animals from the winter eggs. A correspondingly early, large aphid population can then be predicted, explains the garden academy.
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Chemical pesticides have disadvantages
What should you do? An important question in times of environmental protection and sustainability. Hobby gardeners should consider several aspects: On the one hand, beneficial insects overwinter on trees that are also suffocated by the non-selective spraying .
And the aphid population can regenerate itself very quickly, for example through the immigration of animals - while the beneficial organisms that eat the aphids have left the garden after a spraying due to a lack of food. According to the garden academy, the natural predators are missing in the second wave.
On the other hand, the plants do not die of aphids for the time being - even if they are badly taken along and sometimes severely weakened. Soot or black mushrooms, for example, can subsequently colonize .
Therefore, conservationists and many experts now recommend that you do not panic at the first aphid. The garden academy calls a spray the "very last resort".
Fittingly : You should never use this home remedy for protection against aphids.
Put on predators and mechanical removal
Instead, the institute advises first to mechanically remove the aphids, i.e. to rinse them from the leaves with a sharp jet of water from the hose. Or you can crush and wipe the animals by hand or cut off heavily infested shoots.
Nature does the rest in a healthy garden - with natural predators such as tits, ladybirds and lacewings .
Read also : Ants plague in the garden? These natural remedies are guaranteed to help.
dpa
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