Hi there,

I've found this to be a terrible year for aphids. The ones on my plants aren't wooly aphids like yours but rather plump little light green ones. I have them every year on my lupins but this year they are super bad. What works for me is to mix 1 tsp of liquid dish soap into a spray bottle (16 oz/455 mL)full of water and then I spray it directly on the aphids. In about 5 minutes the aphids that have been sprayed are all dead. Unfortunately I never seem to get all of them so every couple of days I have to go out and repeat the spraying but it is definitely keeping them under control.

I started out with a more concentrated soap solution but found that this turned the leaves black if I didn't rinse it off within about 10 minutes. Now that I've reduced the amount of soap to the 1 tsp/bottle concentration I can spray it on and leave it without rinsing and the leaves don't get damaged.

Another thing that works for me is I have quite a few ladybug larva around the yard at the moment so I keep moving them onto my lupins and the plants that have the most ladybug larva have the least aphids.

~Jen~

Try a product called Ambush its a fruit tree spray works great.

I did a quick search and found the ingredient in Ambush is permethrin. I already have a product with that in it that I bought by accident last year when I really wanted pyrethrin. Senior moment, I guess. Anyway there's some scary warnings on the permethrin, but I might give it a try if my recent insecticidal soap treatment fails. This type of aphid seems much more difficult to control and really makes of mess of the vine.