Aphids

I bought two columnar apple trees and was very unhappy to discover a month after I planted them one of them was infested, infested with aphids. They were all over the upper leaves and the ants were happily traveling up and down the trees doing their ant/aphid symbiosis thing. It's funny because the trees are right next to each other and the other one had about two aphids on it. This makes me worry about the general health of my tree, because I've read that insects will attack the weaker of the species and leave the stronger alone.

There they are, doing their aphid work. On the upside, though, doesn't my camera take nice up-close pictures? I continually marvel at its power, even though it is such a tiny thing.

I read that aphids don't like garlic, so I put an entire head of garlic in my food processor, added some water, pulverized the garlic in the water and then let it sit for about an hour. I then strained out the garlic and poured the water into a spray bottle. In the lower right corner you can see the top of the spray bottle, as well as the plastic spoon that came in handy later.

I sprayed the garlic water everywhere on that tree. And the healthy one next to it. I covered those aphids in garlic water. The aphids didn't really do anything. With a pesticide, they would have all died at once, but these aphids seemed to just sit there, drenched in garlic water. So I took the garlic itself and piled it around the tree.

I still had garlic, and figuring that it wouldn't hurt anything anyway, piled it on the leaves on top of the aphids. I wanted to send a strong (yet not fatal) message, that those aphids needed to move on.

The next day the aphids were still there. I gave up on non-violent hinting and started scraping them off with a spoon and dousing the leaf in garlic water. I did this for about three days, then got distracted and sort of forgot about the aphid problem. About a week later I looked and the aphids were gone. All gone. No ants walking up and down the tree, no aphids on the tree, no nothing. I'm not sure if the garlic thing worked, or the aphids grew up and flew away, but they aren't there anymore and the tree is growing. Yay garlic! And inattention!