Scale from hell

[MARYANNA]

I need to use a systemic on my orchids with brown scale. Do I have to remove all of them from leaves and stems before I do so or will they die and fall off without my doing so? I am new in this group and not sure on how to post.thanks

[Anton]

Welcome to the forum Maryanna.

When I was in the same boat 3 years ago, I had 20 Cyms afflicted.

There was no way I was going to individually treat each leaf....too many.

I bought a 2 litre garden pump sprayer filled it with systemic insecticide, here in Australia we have one called White Oil. I diluted it and sprayed all the leaves until they were saturated.

I then repeated in 10 days. At this stage, you should have killed the adults and any eggs. I then repeated in another 10 days, just to be sure. If you then run a cloth on the leaves, you should be able to easily wipe them off the leaves.

If you have them outside, keep you eye out for ants as they harvest scale. I have gotten rid of the ant nests in the vicinity of my Cyms and haven't looked back since.

All you need to do then is prophylactic treatment once a year.

hopefully that should do it.

Good luck.

[MARYANNA]

Thank you for your reply, however I am going to drench the pots this time with the systemic I have tried the spray in the past and they still came back, Hence the scale from hell.

[Anton]

Scale live on the leaves, not in pots.

Must be some other little nasty you are infested with.

If you go into the photo galleries and then in to the "Pests and Diseases" section, you will see images of my scale attack.
See if what you have looks like these.

[NancyG]

Hi Maryanna,

I have used Bayer 3 in One Rose care. It is a sysetmic and disease, fertilizer and insecticide rolled into one. It took care of the scale on orchids and my gardenias. I purchased it at Home Depot.

You might want to add your location in your personal info in the upper right.

Good luck,
NancyG

[Andrew]

I use malathion to treat both soft and hard scale. I treat every 3 days for 4 applications (they should be gone after 2 applications but I want to make sure they're dead). It's not systemic so I spray leaves thoroughly and dunk the pot into a bucket of it. Scale can get down into the base of the plant and the juvenile stages can move throughout the pot so I find that treatment of the leaves is insufficient. Organophosphates aren't the nicest chemicals so take the usual precautions handling it.