Best anti-aphid spray?

[escapingthecity]

We've just had a lovely new garden planted and landscaped - took a few months but the aphids have arrived on our tulips and roses. What's the best spray to get rid of them?

Best is to do nothing, and let nature find its own balance. Soon you'll see birds, especially blue tits feeding on the aphids, and if you look closely you'll see ladybirds and their larvae chomping them too. It's just the circle of life, and your garden is already an important habitat.

2nd best if you have to do something is to use your hand, and wipe them off.

3rd best i guess is to make a spray out of a bit of washing-up liquid in water, and spray that on. That sort of suffocates them. It will also kill any 'nice' bugs that are already there.

Washing up liquid diluted a bit works well.

If you spray aphids then you will never attract the predatory insects that eat aphids.

We have aphids on our roses for a few weeks every year and we have loads of sparrows that come and eat them.

They don’t seem to damage the roses and it usually only lasts a couple of weeks, always around this time of year.

So I’m also in the just leave them to it camp.

Another vote for 'wait for the predators'. Or buy some ladybird larvae if you want to help things along.

Yet another vote for waiting for the blue tits to arrive. Buy mail order ladybird larvae if you want to speed things along.

I don’t have birds in my garden as someone round here feeds the seagulls that are here ( I don’t live near the sea ). And they scare them all away.

I come out every morning with my cup of tea and just check over the plants that get aphids and I just squash them. I do the same again when I come home. The problem will come if u ignore it even for a day as they can come on mass in a few hours.

my husband brings home ladybirds. I have planted ladybird living plants. But I still cannot get them naturally in my garden. Keep on top of it is the best thing. I have never found a spray that works to be honest.

Another on for just leave it. A couple of years ago I had so many caterpillars on some Brussels sprouts. I’d meant to cover them before going on holiday, but forgot. When I looked a few days later, nearly all the caterpillars were gone, and I spied some blue tits hunting around in the veg garden. Lesson learned!

I think the birds & butterflies make your garden even more beautiful and interesting, and they need the whole food chain to be working, so live with it if you can.

If they’re doing dreadful damage to new plants which won’t recover (honestly, most will) then wipe them off those plants like pp’s suggest

I used to have 2 wrens who would come and strip off the caterpillars from the nasturtiums that I planted next to my brassicas as sacrificial crops.

They would wait til they were heaving in caterpillars and then spend a few days coming back every few hours to take what they could and a week later it was completely clear.

I used to work with an aphid taxonomist, who told me that aphids are born already pregnant with the next generation. Hence their capacity for speedy multiplication

We use pyrethrum