I have a few non-prime spots open in my strawberry tower, and I didn't want to put really good expensive strawberries in there because they'd either die or produce badly anyways. Now I'm not sure if it was a good idea, but I saw some half-off strawberry plants at the nursery yesterday and they didn't look too bad, so I picked them up.
I was 100% prepared for them to be infested with something, so I chopped off all dodgy looking leaves and all flowers right away and am keeping them quarantined inside for at least 1-2 weeks (all my other strawberries are outside on my balcony). I rinsed them off very thoroughly, first with running tap water then with slightly soapy water from a squirt bottle. the plan is to do that twice a day until I see no more bugs.
Here's all the bug varieties I found before rinsing this morning:

My guess is that it's just green aphids? Although that fat round fella from the first picture and the white guys from the last picture are throwing me for a loop, so I'm not 100% sure.

Do you think rinsing twice a day will be good enough to get rid of them?

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[–] evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago*

Definitely just aphids. Soap or diatomaceous earth work as noted (though they do wash off, so they need to be reapplied after rain).

It's important not to over-fertilize any plant with aphids cause then their populations really explode. Also, for small populations like this, you can just knock them off the plant with a spray of water, a paintbrush, or my personal favorite: a cordless air duster (basically a hair dryer with no heat and a nozzle). Just knock them off every day for a week, and they should all be gone.

Don't put them close to other plants, though.

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