green thumb
if you have one – please help!! you see, i bought a gorgeous plant that looked like this
prior to leaving for our honeymoon – upon our return it looked fairly dead. while trying to revive it, i noticed a web like substance under the leaves making them curl under with little rust colored dots. i spent a frew days religiously cleaning the leaves and spraying it with garlic-water until new leaves started growing again and the pests seemed to disappear.
but i keep finding the bugs from time to time and my leaves turn yellow quickly after they appear…making my once gorgeous plant now appear like this
pitiful, no?
lately i’ve switched from garlic water to Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap Hemp Tea Tree pure-castile soap as an insecticide spray – i heard these are good natural sprays but am not sure i bought the right soap for it. any tips on how to make my plant happy again?
Hey Chickie! I looked up your plant on line, and I think it’s an Alocasia Micholitziana.
The stuff I read says that they can be susceptible to spider mites, which sounds like what you have. They’re really hard to control, and really hard to get rid of. A lot of sites just say to discard the plant altogether.
Anyway, you can google the plant name and spider mites and find all the info you need.
Love!
thanks sis! ok – so i looked online and it said you could also spray the plant off cause the bugs are easliy drowned. i put the plant in the shower and gave it a good spray and couldn’t see anymore bugs but it still looked pretty sad.
then isseki got me some mite killing insecticide and i sprayed it all over my pitiful plant. that stuff smelled like hell and made a zillion tiny cracks in the plastic measuring cup i fixed it in! ugh. so that was a couple of days ago and it’s still pitiful but producing new sprouts (though the new leaves seem to be getting smaller and smaller) so maybe there still is hope.
it’s like plant cancer – maybe i’ll kill the bugs…or maybe i’ll drown or kill the thing with chemicals first! we shall wait and see…