Hi Cindy. Welcome to NGA!
If it is an outdoors plant, and fairly sturdy, you might be able to knock a lot of them off with a hard, fine water spray. The "Mist" setting on a hand-held hose sprayer might be enough. If not, try the "flat spray" setting, if it is not so hard that it blasts pieces of the plant right off the stems. A couple of irrigation "mini=jet sprayers" run at full city-water-pressure ought to be effective without ripping leaves off.
It makes sense to knock as many off as you can, before you go about poisoning or hand-picking them.
(P.S. If the plant is outdoors, and you can keep them from eating it to death for a few weeks, they may attract predatory insects that will cheerfully eat them all up for you.)
Try to get
under the leaves and spray upwards to knock off hiding ones, or egg masses if there are any.
One advantage of the water-spray method is that it is as non-toxic as anything gets.
For buggy house plants, I have heard people talking about taking the plant into the shower stall and using the shower to spray bugs off leaves. Harrumph! All I know is that trying to bottom-water seedling trays in my tub totally clogged the drain and made me send for a plumber! What I READ says "cover the soil in the pot with your hand", but maybe they are talking about well-coordinated people!
You might also experiment with "generic" home-made bug sprays like alcohol+soapy-water. "Insecticidal soap" is a real thing - they say it's the fatty acids in soap that kill the insects.
Here are some recipes I've seen online. Your mileage may very. I see a range in soap concentration from 2 tsp/gallon up to 6 tblsp (18 tsp!) per gallon.
BTW, several people make the point that store-bought insecticidal soap is always SOAP, not detergent.
And I saw this somewhere online: "Many detergents are also insecticidal (not all) but might harm plants".
1.
2-6 tblsp of baby shampoo per gallon of water (which seems like a LOT of soap to me!)
or
2.
Soapy water spray: ½ tsp “dish soap” per Quart (2 tsp/gallon)
3. aphid spray:
http://garden.org/ideas/view/p...
To 1 gallon of water, add:
2 tbsp. Murphy's Oil Soap,
2 tbsp. vegetable oil, and (maybe this is imitating Neem oil??)
2 tbsp. isopropyl alcohol.
4. Homemade oil spray:
- two tablespoons of cooking oil
- two tablespoons of baby shampoo
- one gallon of water.
- optionally + one cup of alcohol to help penetrate the insect’s shell. (Note that this is a LOT of alcohol. Like 1:16)
P.S. If the plant is indoors, it is certainly proving an attractive home to SOME bugs, and I assume they are breeding on it, multiplying their numbers. When (or if) they kill the plant they're on, they will move to whatever is nearby. You might consider quarantining it in a different room until you've seen NO bugs for a week or three. If you can put it outside, it might attract whatever eats that kind of bug.
Or seal it tightly in plastic and put it into the garbage. It depends on how much you like THIS plant, and how much you like all your other plants combined.
