Aphids Abolished (Hopefully)

Thank you to everyone who offered help with the aphids on my lemon tree. The advice from my favorite source and the consensus seemed to agree - I had to manually remove the remaining aphids from the leaves and stems if I wasn’t going to use pesticides. Q-tips were recommended, so that’s what a I used.

Of course this was much easier in my mind, and it turned into quite a labor intensive project. The tree has so many leaves! And the problem turned out to be much worse than I initially thought - there were aphids everywhere, on both sides of the leaves and stems. Every single leaf was contaminated. It took hours and hours and hours (luckily aphids don’t seem to move that fast) and a ton of Q-tips. See how dirty those Q-tips are? That gunk is actually squashed aphid parts. The leaves are ones I accidentally pulled off in the process (oops).

Next up: the lime tree. Luckily there are almost no aphids on this one, but I still have to go over every leaf to make sure...