Hi,
I know these are such basic questions but I don't remember so many bugs before this year. I have been spraying all my plants seem to have bug damage with 1 part soap to 40 parts water but it doesn't seem to be having enough effect. Can folks look at my pics and tell me what they think the damage is being caused by?
Is this pic representative of the level of damage you're seeing on most of your plants? If so I wouldn't worry, you're never going to have a perfect garden with no holes in the leaves and that doesn't look like a huge problem. But if you've got things that are worse off, there are a couple of reasons why your soap solution may not have been working. For starters, soap works best on soft bodied insects like aphids. If you've got something like beetles that have a hard shell, it'll have minimal effect on them. And even if it is a soft bodied thing like aphids, I'm not sure a 1:40 dilution of soap is going to have any impact at all, that is very dilute. I'd go buy yourself a container of commercial insecticidal soap, you know that it is designed to have the right concentration to kill things and it doesn't have extra stuff like fragrances which your plants don't need. Also if the bugs aren't there when you're spraying your soap solution on the plants, that further decreases the chances that it's going to kill them. I'd also try and catch some bugs in the act of eating your plants...first of all by knowing what it is you can make sure you're buying the right stuff to kill it with, and also most insecticides work best if you spray them on the bug that's causing the problem.
