Scale is a bug. When you can see it, it looks like a bump. There are different varieties; hard, soft, easy to see and not so easy. Once the bug settles down to business it stops looking like a bug and starts looking inconspicuous....that's when your leaves start turning yellow and falling off. On an orange tree we have in the greenhouse, the telltale sign that clued me in was the sticky "honeydew" that is scale's byproduct. They need protein to live, and there's not a lot of that in plant juice, so after sucking out enough plant sap to get the protein they need, it leaves a lot of sugar left over, and that's what they 'discard', hence the sticky stuff called honeydew, which shows up on the leaf surfaces. Seeing that I knew something was going on, but this soft scale is greenish and very hard to see. Scraping it off with a fingernail, and a light coat of parafinic oil in the cool of shade will keep it under control.
We are harvesting big, ripe strawberries. Unfortunately, this picture doesn't show the prizewinners because they disappeared almost as soon as they came in the kitchen door and were rinsed off. : )
1 comment:
Yes, those missing strawberries were as good as they were big!
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