Today's garden crawl

[HAB911]

turned up a pest on the Fig. What I thought might be someone's eggs, turned out to be the actual animal, sucking the life force out of my fig. Fig wax scale, Ceroplastes rusci, invasive sap-sucking pest that covers itself in a hard, pinkish-gray to white waxy layer. It feeds on the phloem of fig. Like aphids, they excrete "honeydew" that ants love. As soon as the temp drops below 100 removal must begin!

[George McGovern]

1. Ugly little suckers. I hope you wipe them out.

[HAB911]

5. I thought I had barnacles!

[Walleye]

2. Well, that's pretty interesting. I've never seen them. I don't know that we have them here.

[HAB911]

3. Made me look

"primarily established in Florida, United States, and has also been reported in various regions worldwide, including the Mediterranean area and parts of South America" first discovered in the mid-1990s

almost everything here is from somewhere else

[George McGovern]

4. Kinda like Kalifornia . . .

[Easterncedar]

6. Ugh! I used to fight magnolia scale by hand in a plant nursery

After an hour of wiping them off, their weird cloying sweet smell would have me gagging.

The alternative, pesticide, would have killed the wasps and lady bugs that were all over helping.