CraftyFox said:
I wouldn't use soap water again.. Not on a pepper. I've learned the hard lesson. Don't listen to that CrazyFox that said soap was safe for peppers, he was off base! Using soap on peppers is a little crazy.
My pepper I treated last fall, with a really dilute wash, didn't die.. It looks great! I mean, at a glance. Then you notice all these leaves that look like they have frost damage. I've tried to explain it away as something else, but it looks like overfeeding damage I've seen with foliar feeding applications. I haven't feed them anything since then and the leaves still come out this way. Not all of them, but enough of them.
I refused to use Aza too, and also stopped fighting them.. To just let the beneficials have at it. It was just a constant war the whole winter.. Benefiicals were never able to get any numbers up because of light kills and other environmental factors I wasn't able to control effectively. Hence, my aphid problems didn't resolve until I put them back outside and exposed them to the full array of predation.
I think, if I had been on top of it, I could have gotten control with just water swabbing.. But that is pure speculation at this point. Isolation can be almost impossible with a standard setup because of light drawing and animal vectoring. I had the stinking cats giving aphids rides upstairs into the bathroom from the first floor.
It is an honorable thing to make updates to one's stated position, when new opinions become available.
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Let me add one thing to the mix here: I can't completely discourage the use of soaps as an option - even though I am, as you know, well aware of the damage that it can cause. This, like many things, is a completely regional issue. I've just done my first grow in the PNW. Overall, my results were pretty good, even though my timing was terrible. But my insect problem was a wildly different animal - yet again - from what I experienced in other places.
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I didn't use anything on my plants out here, other than my fingers. I had 3 different types of aphids show up. I had one pepper plant and 7 tomato plants (which they basically left alone). I just squished them. No problem. It lasted about a week, and we were done. I couldn't get away with that in Florida. I suspect many others couldn't, in their part of the world, either. I've had problems getting the bennies to stay, and they can't outcompete the farming ants. It's such a multi-pronged problem. Every year back home, it literally seems like an insect armageddon. I have to choose my battles. During some parts of the year, it pays to do nothing. Later on, I might need to do something. But it seems like I always have to have a plan to mitigate whatever course of action I take. I am always trying to find some better way to stay ahead.
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This year, I'm going to go to bigger raised beds, and no fertilizer. Nothing but organic matter (since I'll have enough surface area to make it practical) and possibly some shade cloth. I still suspect that there is something about using fertilizer - yes, even organics - that attracts insects. I still anticipate insect problems. I will still keep mild soap solutions in my arsenal. But using them sparingly, or in some alternative way, where possible.
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I had an early problem with snails and slugs out here. Huge ones. Every time one of them even so much as touched a tomato leaf, the leaf would wither and die. I can't fault a critter for wanting to eat, so instead of killing them all, I just put out a lettuce leaf every night. Like 20 would show up. At the end of the week, I'd gather them all up (once they were used to showing up there in one place), and I relocated them. Easy solution. Get them 100 feet away, and they won't come back.
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There's always another way waiting to be discovered. Chemical solutions are quick and immediately effective - but they have drawbacks that show up somewhere, somehow. You don't eve get something for nothing.
