Aphids on potato plant indoors, during winter.

[Sinder]

So ive just recently spotted some alive aphids on my indoor potato plant i planted a potato like 3 weeks ago and its sprouting. but ive spotted few aphids, how is this possible for them to attack the potato plant now during winter when its like 7- outside? it's not a lot of them right now so i will start removing them, but the reason i made this thread is because im curious how they would get to the plant when aphids stay dormant during winter and dies within couple days without food. i have no plants in my house other then my potato and chili seedlings, in august i removed 3 chili plants because of extreme aphid attacks, but the pots i used then have been washed and not used yet so how did the aphids find their way to the potato plant?

is there aphids living inside the potato or such since its only the potato i can spot em on?

google wasnt so helpful so hopefully someone have an answer.

 

[CaneDog]

That sounds like a very unlikely situation to have aphids appear. Probably eggs somewhere, but I would never have expected them based on what you described. It's a bad situation though; if they get to the pepper seedlings that can be big trouble.

 

[Sinder]

yeah i found it weird too, but google wasn't so helpful in giving me a answer on this. i sprayed the plant earlier with soap and baking powder water solution and the hard spray helped getting em off, but whats the point with soap and baking powder if it doesn't kill the aphids? some of the sprayed aphids fell down into the soil and crawled back onto the plant, is not the soap and baking powder supposed to kill them? why not just use normal water?

 

[CaneDog]

Bottom line is you're unlikely to eliminated the aphids once you have them inside. With fewer plants than I grow now, I've been effective by simply taking the plants to the shower every several days and either spraying them off with the shower head or inverting them into a 5 gallon Home Depot bucket (plain tap water in each case) and agitating them to remove the aphids. I do this every several days over a few weeks in an effort to catch new aphids that hatch before they reproduce, and then again when they reappear - they always seem to reappear after winter and before plant-out time even when they plants have remained inside. I've successfully gotten batches of overwinter plants to plant out this way, but only when I had manageable numbers of plants.

The problem with seedlings and young plants is they aren't strong enough for sprayed water treatment nor do they stand up well to soaps, oils, and other treatments. Plus it takes minimal aphid predation to kill them or significantly retard their growth, often permanently. If the aphids get into the nursery, it's an extremely bad situation and I'd be seriously considering removing all inside plants and starting over. What's crappy is that you basically did get rid of your plants and start over and still somehow they came back. I've never had that happen to me and it shouldn't happen like that.

 

[Sinder]

Bottom line is you're unlikely to eliminated the aphids once you have them inside. With fewer plants than I grow now, I've been effective by simply taking the plants to the shower every several days and either spraying them off with the shower head or inverting them into a 5 gallon Home Depot bucket (plain tap water in each case) and agitating them to remove the aphids. I do this every several days over a few weeks in an effort to catch new aphids that hatch before they reproduce, and then again when they reappear - they always seem to reappear after winter and before plant-out time even when they plants have remained inside. I've successfully gotten batches of overwinter plants to plant out this way, but only when I had manageable numbers of plants.

The problem with seedlings and young plants is they aren't strong enough for sprayed water treatment nor do they stand up well to soaps, oils, and other treatments. Plus it takes minimal aphid predation to kill them or significantly retard their growth, often permanently. If the aphids get into the nursery, it's an extremely bad situation and I'd be seriously considering removing all inside plants and starting over. What's crappy is that you basically did get rid of your plants and start over and still somehow they came back. I've never had that happen to me and it shouldn't happen like that.

i haven't spotted any on the seedlings yet, i moved the potato plant away from the seedlings and put the plant under its own lamp, a bit royal for 1 potato. but probably better then letting it spread to the seedlings until ive done the spray/wash method for couple weeks. if it continue to appears i guess il just get rid of the potato as id rather get my chilis back to producing fruits again then growing potatoes.

yeah i threw away 3x 2 years old chili plants, put em into bags and into the garbage outside so its weird, are aphids able to survive in soil for months or even weeks?
ive never had this aphid issue before until this summer when i put all my plants into a greenhouse for the summer, once i toke em inside i spotted hundreds of them on my plants couple weeks later, before this i was growing indoors only and never had any issues other then edema. but wont stop me from continueing as i have a second greenhouse on the way for a bigger potato,onion,carrot farm.

i can spot few aphids that i squeezed by my fingers on the potato just recently after posting this so the spraying havent worked 100% but defiantly removed some of them so il just continue to try to fight them.

With the depot bucket, do you hold the plant upside down and dip the plant into bucket of water or how does that work?

 

[CaneDog]

With the depot bucket, do you hold the plant upside down and dip the plant into bucket of water or how does that work?

Yep. With some plants the invert-and-dunk method (agitating them carefully) is easier and more effective than trying to spray-off the plant completely. Other times the showerhead spray works better, especially if the soil is loose and inverting would cause soil to fall out of the container. I usually invert when the soil is dry because it holds together better.

 

[Sinder]

@CaneDog
i'm still struggling with the aphids, I'm not sure how they keep coming back. i found the shower method best for my mature grown plant and dip into bucket of water while rubbing the leaves with hand for the smaller plants/seedlings. but even if i do this everyday, the aphids keep coming back after some days or even just couple hours later. is it possible that the aphids have injected eggs into the Leaves or something that the shower spray cant reach? its making me go crazy because every plant i have inside that room keeps getting aphids even if i keep daily showering it.

like i can see the aphids getting flushed down the shower when i shower the plants so its working, but its not fixing the problem yet.

i really dont want to start all over from seed with all this again, so aphids is really annoying.

it might be easier to keep them under control during summer when they have predators but right now the only predator they have is me because of the cold winter.

 

[CaneDog]

Bummer about the aphids being so bad. I know that's super frustrating.

There's a couple things you might consider, which can work really well until things start to warm up in spring. There often seems to be a period where the aphids got a head start over their natural predators and spraying may be needed until things balance off again.

1. Temperature - the warmer the plants, the more active the aphid cycle. I keep my OW's in a cold (5c) garage with an LED light (less heat emission than tubes) and aphids don't appear on my OW's until the spring warm-up. This assumes no attempt to produce pods OW.

2. Pruning - if you're overwintering without attempting pod production, consider pruning larger peppers back to just a few branches with a few viable-looking growth nodes on each branch. Taking the plants back to minimal foliage means FAR few aphids will survive each spray-off to further terrorize your grow. Pruning the OW's back to fewer growth nodes can also help the plant rebound faster in spring.

Just a couple ideas. Hope things get better!

 

[Grass Snake]

I've never seen potatoes grown indoors. Hope you can get aphids under control.

 

[Sinder]

I've never seen potatoes grown indoors. Hope you can get aphids under control.

the potatoes grew pretty good indoors, but it attracted a lot of aphids so i removed the entire plant, but when i ripped the potato plant outoff dirt before i threw it out i could see smaller potatoes being made so its defiantly something that would be cool to do in a bigger scale as it was cool how one potato multiplied so fast.