I stopped by Rocket Jones, and I found he's having a bit of a wasp problem... I can sympathize... I've got one of my own, though the spray is working nicely... However, on the other side of the insect size scale is a bug which I am having issues with... Now, understand, these bugs don't bite, nor do they even swarm humans... On the whole, we don't even exist in their buggy brains... What they do however is to reproduce like crazy (1 turns in to 16,000 in an average growing season up here). They live on the sap from plants, and they seem to truly love tomato plants...
I couldn't care less about tomato plants since I don't like tomatoes, but my girlfriend does, and I have the space to grow them, so as such I do... My plants are now almost 8 feet tall, and one of them has over a hundred tomatoes on it in bunches sort of like grapes... Now while I don't care for tomatoes, I'll be damned if some bug is going to kill a plant that I want to be there for whatever the reason... So off I went to get some pesticide at Home Depot...
Just a bit of info here... The bug in question is the Whitefly... Those of you with gardens probably just twitched... I know your pain...
Well the bugs laughed at what I got from HD... I thought that strange, because every other bug in the vicinity seemed to be dead on the ground around the tomatoes... So I thought I'd do a bit of research on these minute tomato terminators...
Turns out that these things are hardy to the extreme... And they develop immunity to new pesticides faster than McDonalds can find ways to re-market their greasy food... So after an extensive search, the end result is that the best way to control these things isn't really chemical in nature.... In enclosed spaces, you can use biological warfare on them in the form of a specific wasp, and a specific lady bug... That doesn't work for me since I'm outdoors... So I'm left with the other option... Smoother them... No, now with a little pillow over their face... You get horticultural oil (preferably from the Neem tree extract) mix it with a little bit of dish soap as an emulsifier, and then mix that with water in the proper proportion... Then you hose down the entire plant... Everything... Leaves (both sides) stalks, stems... Naturally the solution is a little sticky since its oil, and soap, so it sticks to the bugs, and completely coats the plant... The bugs can't breath, and smoother or drown... Their corpses tend to get stuck to the plant, and wherever you've blasted them with the spray... Somehow that's terribly satisfying... Only thing better would be to mount them all on very tiny pikes as a warning to their friends which will be back in a few days...