Bugs are destroying my peppers. Here’s how I’m dealing with them.

Aphids… I have encountered them before, but not very soon. And when I saw them on my pepper plants, I was stunned. After my last meet with them, I ended with my plants being completely destroyed. There bugs ruin all the young leaves, while living on the old ones. And they seem to make colonies, which are very hard to cope with. This time I was not sure if I can save my precious hot pepper plants.

I ended up reading a lot of articles with ideas how to get rid of these pests. Last time I tried to kill them with soap water, but it tends to make a lot of damage to the plants, especially if they are young. I spotted some interesting bugs, apart from the aphids, and I don’t know what they may be. Is it possible, that they eat the aphids, or are just more mature aphids? I really didn’t find information about them.

After some research, as I said, I learned that ladybugs are a natural enemy of aphids and I immediately understood why there was one in the pepper plant. It just came to eat some fancy lunch on my plant.

And my idea? Well, I thought that it would be nice if I had a couple more ladybugs and they share the same meal for a day or two. Luckily, I live in a block of houses and a lot of gardens and plants, so I thought there would be some ladybugs in the surrounding gardens. And I decided it would be nice to take my little son on a walk, because he loves sleeping outside in this warm weather. As a result I combined walking with the baby and hunting for some ladybugs. All I needed was a jar. So job done…

After about an hour, I found 7 more ladybugs, and I was absolutely sure that they would enjoy a dinner at my pepper plant. Well, they seemed to enjoy the new “party place” and only two days later, I think they have eaten the majority of the aphids. All that is left on the plant are some residual marks from their stay on the pepper, but now I don’t see any bugs at all. Ladybirds are also gone, maybe due to the fact there is no food left on the leaves.

Now the only creatures on the pepper plants are some caterpillars, but they don’t seem to be eating the leaves, or making any damage to the plant. So I assume, they also were pleased to enjoy eating some aphids.

Now I will most likely continue to observe the plants and if I see some signs of aphids coming back, I will go for another ladybug hunt. That’s for now. Hope to see my plants grow healthy from now on. See you soon and have a nice day!