After gardening most of my life, you’d think that I’d know what I was doing, but I just made a mistake that’ll cost me some time and “work.” All because I I enjoyed myself and got a little lazy. You see, I enjoy sitting on my deck after supper and watching the fireflies blink on and looking around at all my indoor plants enjoying the outside. What I forgot to do was turn over the leaves occasionally to check for problems.
Then the other night, I noticed my Meyer lemon tree looked a little “off”, some of the leaves just a teeny bit droopier than before. I took a closer look. Ugh! Scale!
You know what scale is, right? They are little hard-shelled insects that attach to the leaves or stems of a plant and suck on plant juices. It’s that hard little shell that make it a problem, because it can protect the insect from a regular pesticide spray, Instead, you need to wipe off each leaf (top and bottom) to remove as much of the scale as possible, then spray with a horticultural oil to help “suffocate” anything you might have left behind.
I should have checked the leaves about once a week or so for signs that something is not right. Check the leaves top and bottom and look for what might be the insects themselves or clusters of what might be eggs. And with scale, you can check for what is known as honeydew, which is a clear sticky liquid on the leaves or even the furniture around the plant. But catching it when it is just getting started is so much easier to deal with than when it has taken oven the plant. Do be sure to isolate the infected plant so the problem doesn’t spread.
You can also use a systemic insecticide, which is absorbed into the plants system, thereby killing the insect when they suck on the plant’s juices.