Aphid Attack.

Very obviously, spring has not only come for the plants and flowers outside, but also for aphids. (Oh, and the cat brought home the first tick of the year yesterday.)

I have a few cooking herbs in pots in the winter garden, and they get used in the kitchen whenever I feel like it, or sometimes they even inspire me to make something that uses a lot of a specific herb (usually when that has grown a lot, and needs pruning or cutting back, and I don't want to throw all of the cutoff parts away). Among those are rosemary, thyme, laurel, marjoram, parsley... and chives.

The latter have been struggling for a while and not grown very enthusiastically, and so I left them alone over the winter - and now I discovered that they had gotten a new fan club, consisting of a metric ton of black aphids. Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo, but basically the green bits of the chives were almost solid black with the little suckers... before I got them.

With the vacuum cleaner.

I have a new aphid-removal method, folks.

That was sort of a random-half-by-accident thing - I was vacuuming up bits of dirt and small dry leaves on the floor, and by accident a few of the chives stalks got pulled into the tube, and lo and behold - all the aphids from there were magically removed. So, obviously, I treated the rest of the chives the same. Instant reduction of the aphid colony by a lot!

Obviously, this method is best suited for robust plants with small leaves, so you can have them sucked into the front part of the vacuum cleaner's suction tube. Chives and marjoram (which also had a few of the guys), my experience says, are perfect for this and will take it like little troopers. This loving modern tech treatment, depending on the suction force you use, might also damage some of the leaves, but hey, there's always something.

The trick to it, as I have found out by now, is to do a few repeat aphid-sucking-sessions: There will probably be aphids on the top of the soil as well, which won't get sucked away, and some of them will just escape your loving ministrations. These, however, will later tend to take up the premium spots that were previously taken by their luckier (or, in this case, unluckier) colleagues and sit nicely on the leaves or stalks a few hours later. Premium spots indeed... to be spirited away by the magic of the suction tube. Repeat as necessary. Have aphid-free plants.

(If you are now thinking of aphid problems on plants outside in your garden, and extension cords to get your vacuum cleaner where it needs to be: We once vacuumed our lawn to remove lots and lots of anti-slip-on-ice gravel that had gotten there together with snow from the walkway during the course of the winter. The easiest way to get rid of those, in our reasoning, was to vacuum them away (it's an older, bag-free vacuum cleaner that is only used for rough things these days). It worked wonderfully, but we did get quite a few astonished looks from the neighbours, and some remarks as well. You might get the same for aphid treatment with a vacuum cleaner.)