What can I do about spittlebugs?
Spittlebugs (aka Froghoppers) are usually noticed as small yellow or green nymphs with an annoying habit of surrounding themselves in a frothy protective mass that looks very much like someone has spit on your plants.
Happily, garden plants are not their first choice for hosts. They far prefer members of the grass family and are particularly fond of hay fields where humans rarely notice them or care about what they might be up to. However, should that hay field be cut down then spittlebugs have been known to relocate to garden plants in their bid for survival.
The good news is that these piercing and sucking insects usually cause minimal damage except in severe cases when they can cause deformed leaves or fruit or cause plants to become stunted.
The simplest way to deal with them is to hit them with a strong spray of water, knocking that foamy mass away from the insects and causing them to dry out. This usually does the trick, but if the problem persists year after year, you can pay a visit to your local garden centre and ask for a more potent solution.
Of course, you can always do what I do and tell visitors that your garden is in the midst of an ongoing scientific research experiment and that disrupting the lifecycle of these particular bugs will have a significant impact on that experiment. For a problem that is primarily cosmetic, that seems like the more ecological way to handle it.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me at vanessa@gardenmuse.ca.
