Lantana

...or as I call it, ‘Verbena, no wait, lantana, or is it verbena? Uh... You know I used to work in a greenhouse where we grew thousands of these things? It’s lantana, definitely lantana. Don’t ask again.’

Some farmers prepping lantana leaves for an insecticidal spray

So apparently lantana leaves, flowers, roots, stems, etc. (we could save time by saying, the whole plant) can be ground up into a paste, the essential oils extracted in a simple water solution, and sprayed as an insecticide. What attracts me most to lantana is the absolute free-ness of it. Often, among those of us who are pitching botanical pest control solutions, there is a tendency to kind of ignore the price of the ingredients going into the mix. When you grind up garlic and onions you can get another apparently decent insecticide, which is fine except that garlic and onions aren't exactly cheap around here and when you start talking about the quantities necessary to spray a whole field of coffee, most farmers are going to start wondering why they’re not just using a packet of Dursban. Lantana on the other hand grows all over Oku and Mbessa, usually being used as an ornamental shrub or hedge and has literally no other current use to give it a monetary value. So harvest it up guys.

So free is good, but effective is really good and that is something I’m not 100% convinced on yet. I have heard that lantana is probably most effective on aphids in the coffee world, but the annoying thing is that it seems like everything is most effective on aphids. So when you’ve got aphids, no problem. The most common insect pest I’ve been seeing lately has been scales and occasionally mealy bugs. Scales are kind of a bear to control with any kind of contact insecticide because they have themselves pretty well protected under a nice waxy coat, so systemic pesticides tend to be more effective, but until I figure out how to get neem on a regular basis, I'm not sure what else would fit that description.

I’ll put some time on the internet to see what suggestions I can get for cleaning up scales, but if there are any suggestions out there, I’d love to hear them. (Pre-emptively, if you have a predatory insect in mind, I like that idea too, but you’ll have to give me suggestions on how to actually get them in Cameroon without breaking all sorts of laws transporting living insects across national borders)