West, how large is your tree? Toni

Hi.. New to the forums. I am a manager for a moderate sized lawn care company in central Florida. The asian scale has been around for roughly 15 years in Florida and we have found it to be one of the toughest pest to get rid of and control. the best way I have found is to treat the pests at 14 day intervals using Merit and Hort oil. After 2 or 3 treatments hose off as much of the pest as possible, wait 2 weeks then treat again. The way the pest infests the plant makes it very difficult to control but it can be controlled. I would disagree with a soil drench as it is impossible to fully drench the roots without contamination.Consistant treatment plan and keeping pups cleared from around it the best way to reduce reinfestations. I hope this helps and if you need more detail I would be happy to help more. My background is 20+ years in Southern tree and lawn care I am also a CPO in the sate of Florida.

I don't have a lemon, but do have a satsuma...did the best I could to protect it but snow and prolonged temps at 17 degrees are just too cold for even a cover in the middle of a yard. My tree is young, but lost all of it's leaves and looked dead for a while. It has slowly put back on leaves....I did give it several fertilizer spikes for citrus trees. It did not, however, bloom. I think that was just too much for it to do. I wouldn't give up yet if it's still green. Baby it and make sure it has enough water and see what happens. I didn't prune the dead leaves after the snow because I felt like that would encourage new growth that would get frozen anyway.

Thanks John. I was thinking that Bayer with Imidacloprid would be a last resort if I could not get something less potent to work. I would be willing to go your route and probably save a lot of time and trouble with trying the organics. Do you think that this Imidacloprid would be safe for these two trees as they were previously water stressed and have dropped a lot of leaves?