Sorry, I didn't catch the part about spraying them. I've dabbed 'em off w/ pure alcohol, never sprayed it. I too would not do that & agree w/ ltecato. I hadn't thought abt K beharensis being fuzzy, I see his point & tend to agree. What abt something like Neem Oil or Bayer Shrub & ____, neither of which I've used but have heard of other folks using well. Or, a systemic, I've used Marathon w/ great success on indoor plants (my Hoyas), never had the mealies come back. (I don't know what phormium is, nwever saw the name before.) I asked abt the Aeonium tabulaeforme 'cause in some cases its rosette lies horizontal, that is perpendicular to the stem & don't think in that case it would drain too well from any application of anything. As to IDing the Aeonium, maybe check Desert-tropicals. com. Never heard this biz of plant tags being too expensive. offer to pay for it if you like these folks plants, that's one of the lamest stories I've ever heard in easily 10 yrs. of growing succulents. At least you've tried to get them to give you the names, i't'd been nice if they could be adult abt it & give you REAL names. Sorry to rant, but I'm amazed that they have great plants & such a juvenile stance abt tags & proper botanical names. Then again, I guess that's preferable to great names & crappy plants!

It's not any of the 3 you mentioned - possibly due to over-watering or a high level of dissolved solids (salts) in the soil. There ARE some other notches on the leaf's margin (that's supposed to be entire), so mechanical injury is another possibility - a 'bruise'. Al

Thanks cactusmharris - I like "someone's playing a joke on you using very small scissors" Very funny! You're right, it is a caterpillar. Al/Tapla had the same suggestion. So I looked again at the plant and found a green caterpillar on the underside of a leaf. It was almost exactly the same color! I had to look very closely to find it. Released it to the outdoors and hoping that was the only one. On a side note, this is one of the few plants that I've bought from a nursery and in my mind I thought one of the benefits of buying from a nursery is that the plants are better taken care of and in better health. I've bought a lot of plants from HD and a few from Lowes and never had a single bug or anything - so far at least!

mcmillan968 I'm with you on the desire to be as chemical free as possible. My purchase of sevin spray was my first 'chemical' purchase in a few years. As you read, I use soap and water for the stink bugs, but I am finding the leaf-footed a bit harder to deal with. If they continue to ruin all of my tomatoes, or at least damage them to the point that they are undesireable to me, then at that point I can stop gardening and save all kinds of energy. If I buy a dustbuster just to deal with the leaf-footed bugs, then I might be doing more environmental harm than just using sevin. A new dustbuster just adds one more battery to our environment. That is, however, why I bought the sevin spray, so I can spray just the individual bugs, as opposed to dusting the entire plant with sevin dust as I did my first year gardening. A spot treatment I believe is what I am employing. Besides, leaf-footed bugs do not sit on flowers, only tomatoes, so sevin will never be sprayed on the flowers, so hopefully the bees will not contact tje sevin. I'll take your kind words to heart and keep looking for convenient methods that do not involve needless chemicals. I guess I'll have to work on my method of grabbing them mechanically a bit more. Thanks Vance