Natural Home Remedies for Plant Lice

I did some background checking on plant lice (in Dutch) and it seems plant lice fly, so there's no guaranteed way to prevent a new infestation once you've gotten rid of the old one. See however the information on lavender below. 

Plant lice are insects and the home remedies used to get rid of them rely on that fact alone. 

Plant lice come in all sorts of colors: black, green, purple and white. My current infestation consists of white plant lice on three of my succulents. 

Plant lice will infect plants most when they're not quite healthy: under watered, over watered, too much food in the soil etc. 

This is my report of using only natural remedies to get rid of them. 

There are basically two ways of getting rid of plant lice: making life annoying for them or killing them. The old soap and alcohol method relies on killing them. The methods I'm trying this week rely on making life annoying so they'll split. Here are some remedies I've heard work:

• Tobacco: putting a plant in a plastic bag and closing it right after lighting a cigarette inside is supposed to work like a charm. You're poisoning the air as well as getting rid of oxygen: I doubt the insects will live. 
• Tobacco: Letting tobacco sit in water so it becomes a sort of soup and then spraying that soup onto the plants. 
• Onions and garlic: the smell of these foodstuffs will drive insects off. More about the method of using onions later.
• Lavender: the smell of lavender too scares insects off. 
• Organic soap: not why, but it works better than your average detergent. See below.

The best thing I can say about the onions method is that my plant lice didn't multiply and do seem to have diminished a bit after a week. However, For now I'm back with the old organic soap trick. More on that later. 

First - what didn't work...

I suspect the mushing of the unions may be part of why my method didn't work. Or maybe my plant lice are a different species from the ones that my online sources had. 

I'm now back with old fashioned soap - organic soap to be precise. I don't mean the lavender smelling soap bars for in the bathroom. I mean the type of soap your grandmother used to clean the kitchen. It was organic in that it wasn't made from petrol. The only thing close to this type of soap I've been able to find in English are soap nuts. See this wizzle on organic aphid control.

In Dutch it's either green soap or soft soap. That is: soap based on Glycerin. I found one liquid soap that fit the prescription on Amazon: Grabgreen dish soap. See below. 

This method can be used with very little to change it with garlic or tobacco. In both cases using a mixer to make the parts as small as possible is a good idea.

In the case of tobacco I'd let it sit longer and put some soap in the water to make more of the chemicals in the tobacco dissolve into the water. 

Garlic can of course also be used in a much simpler way: just put a clove of garlic in the soil of the plant you're trying to save. However, I'm not sure I'd trust that method in the case of an infestation like mine. Spraying seems absolutely necessary. 

Unfortunately only the soap water spray method works reasonably well: it gets rid of MOST of the plant lice on my succulents. I've had to keep spraying to get that effect though. That's the problem with not getting rid of all of them, I'm afraid. 

Adding turpentine to the mix - making it a soap-turpentine spray - seems to get rid of the last stragglers. 

"Aphids, also known as plant lice and in Britain and the Commonwealth as greenflies, blackflies or whiteflies, (not to be confused with "jumping plant lice" or true whiteflies) are small sap sucking insects, and members of the superfamily Aphidoidea. Aphids are among the most destructive insect pests on cultivated plants in temperate regions. The damage they do to plants has made them enemies of farmers and gardeners the world over, but from a zoological standpoint they are a very successful group of organisms. Their success is in part due to the asexual reproduction capability of some species."

With thanks to wikipedia