How to Deal with Whiteflies

In my second year of gardening I had to learn how to deal with whiteflies.  Lots of whiteflies.  Tiny little buggers that were absolutely devouring and destroying first my squash, then my peas, then my beans, and on to other things.  Everything I tried seemed to not work, and they just got worse!   How do you kill the little life sucking things?   Thinking it would be easier to find specific soil and pest solutions by planting each of my crops in their very own containers, I had planted squash in one, beans in the next, then peas in the third, and carrots in the fourth, and finally tomatoes in a 5th.  Our squash came up first, and we were so excited!!!  I bought some yellow squash from the farmer’s market.  My 6 year old proclaimed after his second meal of steamed yellow squash that yellow squash was his favorite vegetable!   Mom WIN!  So you can imagine his excitement when the first thing that came up in our garden was the squash!  I planted 4 — 2 each of 2 types of yellow squash.  Only two came up, but they started out looking awesome!   …until the whiteflies struck.  Had I known then what I know now, I would have bypassed everything else and just went straight for the soapy water at the first site of them.  Unfortunately I hadn’t learned that trick yet, and tried relentlessly to deter them with neem oil, cinnamon, coffee grounds, etc.  By the time I learned that the BEST solution that did not involve concerning chemicals was water with a few drops of dish soap, I was dealing with an all-out infestation!  So, How DO you deal with Whiteflies?

1. Get a fairly powerful spray bottle – the ones that you get from the store that you can pump pressure into would be best.  You will have to spray specifically the under side of the leaves to actually deal with your infestation.
2. Fill it with water
3. For every gallon of water you need to add approximately 1 tsp of dish detergent.
4. For good measure, I also added some neem oil.
5. Spray the UNDER side of every single leaf, and the dish detergent will actually kill the flies.
6. Make sure you preemptively treat anything and everything around them too, or your infestation will just move around.
7. Repeat every day until you don’t have whiteflies any more!  They have a life cycle, and you have to retreat to catch the new hatchlings, so you’ll need to repeat minimally twice, but I found it best with our infestation to treat every day or every other day for at least a week!  And the MINUTE I saw any new ones emerging, it got treated again!!!

Whether it is dealing with whiteflies or any number of other issues in your garden, we believe that gardening should be easy, and has benefits far beyond what most people understand!  If you want to find products that make gardening easy, or you want to learn how you can literally grow better health for you and your family, visit us at GrowHealthYourself.com.