What's going on everyone out there in Garden World? Hope you're doing well. So today we're going to talk about a pest that's super annoying and as I get more into my houseplant game, my greenhouse game,

these are coming up a little bit more.

So these would be white flies.

These are tiny pale pests.

They suck the sap from plants.

They spread diseases, and they are so miniscule, they're so tiny, that they can fit through a lot of mesh screening.

Because of this, the white fly is a massive problem in greenhouses, hydroponics, and indoor growing

spaces.

So let's go ahead and figure out how to get rid of them.

And as you know here on the podcast, we were talking about pests we always talk about

the life cycle because you have to understand that in order to understand how to combat a

pest. The only way to kill a pest is to disrupt its life cycle, otherwise it will keep coming back, right?

So here is the life cycle of the whitefly. In the later part of spring, white fly adults place their eggs on undersides of leaves.

Typically they do these in these sort of weird concentric patterns towards the upper

portion of the plant. I would suggest you go take a look at epic gardening.com

forward slash white flies to see a picture of that pattern because if you

recognize the pattern you'll know you're dealing with white flies right off the

bat now here's the crazy thing An adult white fly can produce 200

to 400 eggs so if you don't catch them you're quickly going to have a real

infestation. It's going to be a really big problem. Five to ten days later after laying eggs, these eggs will hatch into nymphs.

The first instar or larval phase, the nymphs are referred to as crawlers. They move a short distance away from their egg, they flatten against the leaf to feed.

There are a total of four instars, but once the crawler has picked its location,

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