Aphids are natural part of organic farming. I’ll admit they are a nuisance and can be icky sometimes (they are a great food source for beneficial insects) but luckily they can’t hurt humans and are usually pretty straightforward to manage.

Try as we might to get rid of and control aphids, you still might find aphids on some of the vegetables you get like; lettuce, kale, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. Probably others I can’t think of right now, oh, Brussels sprouts. Holy moly do aphids like Brussels sprouts.

You might find them on the underside of leafy greens.

Here are some on the top of this cauliflower.

And the underside too. There are only a couple, they are hard to see, but they are there.

We have a machine that is a conveyor belt/sprayer we use to wash soil off vegetables and also use it to try to spray aphids off vegetables we harvest. Aphids are great at hiding so you might need to do some aphid control at home in addition to what we do.

I think the easiest way to get rid of them is to put your vegetable in a sink and spray them with the strongest spray you have and simply wash them away. Spray from the top and the bottom!

You can also soak your vegetables before or after spraying them to give them a good once over. While they are soaking give them a good swish around the water to help dislodge the aphids. We like to soak the vegetables at the farm in addition to using the conveyor sprayer, the aphids dislodge and float to the top of the water. Wyatt likes to add some salt to the water at home and says that helps dislodge them. I’ll have to try it.

This picture I am soaking the cauliflower after spraying, you can see a few aphids floating that I missed with the sprayer.

Sometimes soaking or spraying isn’t even necessary. I had a cabbage with a few aphids and I just peeled off a couple leaves and it was clean as can be under a few leaves I composted.

The only way to control aphids 100% is to use pesticides (I think about pesticide use when I am in the grocery store looking at broccoli or Brussels sprouts with no aphids or caterpillars and personally, I keep walking) obviously we aren’t willing to use chemicals and we’ll deal with aphids as they come, as best we can.

It does involve an extra step or two on our part and sometimes yours. We hope you understand and think it is worth the trouble/effort.

We do.