Help me, LJ gardeners!

[rivka]

We're having an insect problem in our garden.

I had been noticing that when I brushed against the parsley or melon plants, a cloud of tiny pale insects flew away. Gradually the parsley grew discolored with pale yellowish spots on the leaves; the melon, too, to a lesser extent. (The parsley and melon are right next to each other.) The parsley appeared to just have a little cosmetic damage for a long time. Abruptly, now, it looks damn near dead.

The insects are perhaps an eighth of an inch long and green. There appear to be more clinging to the undersides of leaves and the stems of the affected plants. I'm pretty sure these are aphids. (I was previously misled by some of them flying when the leaves were disturbed, because I didn't know aphids flew.)

What's the best response? I'm shocked at how quickly the parsley went. I'll be so sad if the melon dies from bug damage, after we finally got it to grow vigorously. I've seen recommendations for washing the plants with soapy water - does that really work? Or do we need to go straight to insecticide?

Comments

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I was told in my entomology class that most of the ladybugs will always try to leave, because they were collected at the other end of their yearly migration. Their tiny brains are certain that they need to go somewhere else, even if they're in a perfectly good garden.

(We also learned that the other end of the migration cycle is in mountain caves, where they are collected from vast heaps of inert insecta using shovels. Dude.)

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I had to snort at 'mountain cave'. Some ladybugs had settled down in my first-floor (UK, second-floor US) office over the winter; I got both the ordinary kind and very small, grey, black-spotted ones.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's funny. We've had some hibernate in our cabin before, but that's not actually very far from a mountain. Maybe there's a population of terribly inept ladybugs as well? Though I don't have any evidence for the mountain business apart from the prof; I'd like to see it sometime if it's true!