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Hi! I am David Epstein and welcome to Growing Wisdom. We like to be fairly honest and show you our dirty laundry here at GrowingWisdom.com. I have a got a fish tail palm here which actually had something called Scale And I was looking at this by the week ago, I have already began to tree it and I was thinking this would make a good segment to show you guys what Scale looks like and then talk about treatment a little bit.
Scales are really nasty bug. It is basically a hard-shelled little insect, it is underneath the leaf. It is a little shell and has an insect underneath the shell. And you know you have it because if you take your finger nail, you could actually move the little scaled insect and it comes off the leaves. It will basically feed on your plant. It will also secrete a bit of a sticky substance which other problems will develop because of that.
So, it is sort of this dominant effect once you get scale, the plant will then have other problems. So how can you treat them? You can take something like alcohol, and you can take a cotton swab or a cotton ball and you can literally wipe the scale off with the cotton ball and that will help a lot especially if you do not have a huge infestation of it. And then what I will do is that I will treat it with an insecticidal soap.
As we always like to stress here GrowingWisdom.com try to go organic when you can because this plant is inside. I have three dogs, you might have kids, and you do not want to use chemicals on the plant. If it was summer time and you could not get the scale under control with the organic products, you could try using an insecticide that has more of a harsher chemical but again we always recommend going organic first.
So scale is one nasty little bug. Check your plants often for if you have the minute. It is treatable, you just have to be diligent and keep at it, and you will be able to keep your plants healthy. Come back every week for all of our hints, tips and helps here at GrowingWisdom.com
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