TL;DR: I’m a relatively new houseplant owner and just spent several hours with rubbing alcohol and cotton swabs de-scaling my relatively large umbrella plant (schefflera). Has anyone else dealt with scale before and successfully gotten rid of it? I’d love to hear your stories!
I’m relatively new to houseplants - before recently, the best I’ve done was a lucky bamboo in college… that I killed because I didn’t water it enough. Two winter holidays ago, my partner got me a ZZ plant and a snake plant, both of which I’ve so far successfully kept alive (though the snake plant has some issues for another post).
Since then I’ve been gifted several other plants - a large umbrella plant last fall, and this May a peace lily, spider plant, and aloe. I hadn’t ever really looked at my schefflera very closely other than to admire the new leaves it rapidly sprouts, but several weeks ago I thought it would be a good idea to let the plants get more sun on our apartment balcony… the schefflera was clearly wilty and unhappy after several hours so I brought it back inside, along with the peace lily. I noticed some sticky stuff on the leaves, but didn’t really pay it much mind. Fast-forward to last Friday when I’m watering them and notice the backs of some of the schefflera’s newer leaves are looking blackened. I looked closer, and noticed what looked really tiny white wriggly things on some of the leaves.
That freaked me out so I ran out and got some 3-in-1 insect spray from Home Depot and applied it liberally to the plant after sunset. I’m not a fan of chemicals but I was really concerned and just wanted to murder whatever I saw immediately. I’d noticed a couple scab-y like things on the peace lily (that I wiped off, and which should have clued me in to what this was…), so I sprayed it too.
I checked in tonight and realized - holy shit those scab-like things are ALLL over my umbrella plant?!! Several google searches later I learn it’s brown soft scale, immediately grab some rubbing alcohol + cotton swabs, and go over every single leaf wiping off those buggers. Some were so small, though, that I’m definitely worried I didn’t get them all. I also have no idea how long the umbrella plant has been infested… my first thought is that the scale came in on the new plants I got in May, but I don’t know if it could have reproduced to the extent I saw on the umbrella plant in 7 weeks? The bottom leaves of the plant fell off every so often since I’ve had it and now I wonder if it was due to this…
I’m feeling terribly guilty, but glad I did catch the infestation eventually, and I think as long as I keep an eye on it for the next couple of weeks and possibly spray it some more, it’ll be okay 🤞
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How is your plant doing so far?
I seem to have rid my snake plant of hard scale, those little armored nightmares. I did it with a combo of scraping them off one by one, and removing the most infected leaves. Afterwards I did a weekly spray with horticultural soap for 2 more weeks. It’s been a few months and they seem to be gone. The plant is about half the size it used to be, that’s how much of it I had to throw away.
The plant’s doing good, thanks for asking! It’s really quite large so even after taking off the worst leaves it’s got plenty of foliage left. I did a treatment with neem oil spray last Sunday (two days after I scraped off all the scale I could see) and when I checked on it last night I didn’t see any new scale or sticky spots. Going to do another neem spray this weekend, and keep an eye on it… hope the buggers are gone but I don’t want to count my chickens too early!
I hope your snake plant recovers and grows back :)
I’ve had no luck getting rid of them by any other means than chemical pest control. I figured since it’s indoor I at least wont harm anything else. It’s important that you use a product that gets absorbed in the sap stream so that when they bite into the leave they get poisoned. They are sturdy bugs, It took me multiple treatments. I used this:
Good to know, thank you! I did see that a chemical with the slow release in the soil for absorption was recommended, so if I’m still seeing them in several weeks I’ll definitely try that. Fingers crossed that manual removal and my two treatment sprays have helped but these seem like annoying buggers to eradicate so I might not get lucky.
I’m currently having a very similar experience with scale on an Aloe Black Gem. It’s the first time I’ve had to deal with insect pests on my houseplants so far. At the moment I’m keeping it separate from my other plants and trying to remove any insects when I spot them, but I will try to pick up some insecticide today to see if that can help.
