The battle of the scale (not the diet kind)

Gene Schurg · 2007-01-23T19:13:01+00:00

For those regular readers of RGO you may remember that I have been battlingthe nasties over the year. The mealies have been gone now for over a yearand my phals really improved. I can't say it's because they aren't beingdragged down by mealies or whether its the change in fertilizer to the MSUformulation from Ray. In either case I have the best looking an branchingspikes I've every had in my collection. Thanks Ray and Enstar II!The Enstar took out the hard brown scale that was around a few of theplants. I don't think it was much of an infestation but I did have problemswith it on a couple of the Oncidiums and Encyclia. I haven't seen hardscale in over a year now. I don't miss popping those hard shells likebubble wrap.The real war was with the soft scale. I tried all the contact stuff fromthe bottle, malathion, orthene, Enstar II, and other stinky stuff. Itwould knock them down but they would just pop up somewhere else. It waslike a game of wack-a-mole in the arcade.Last summer I bought the Bayer Advanced Tree & Shrub Insect ControlConcentrate. At first I didn't do my arithmetic correctly and was applyingit at a reduced rate and didn't see any affect. After returning to thecalculator I realized my mistake and I applied it at a rate of 1 oz pergallon through the dos-a-matic injection system. I did this for threeconsecutive weeks of watering in August.Since this is a systemic and must be sucked up by the roots of the plant Ithought three weeks of application would insure that the plants carried theinsecticide throughout the entire plant. According to the label when usedon trees and shrubs it is effective for an entire year. In October Ithought I saw another outbreak of scale and applied another application buthave decided that I only saw eggs hatching.The eggs of the scale seem to last many months. Five months afterapplication I do not find any live adult scale. On the older growths anddeep in the sheaths I do find crawlers. When I find them I clean...