Yellow Sticky Sheets

Many sap-sucking pests are attracted to the color yellow, and you can use that to your plants’ advantage.

Much the way sticky barriers prevent crawling insects from climbing up into fruit and nut trees, yellow sticky sheets attract and trap many flying insects that might carry death and disease to your garden plants.

Yellow sticky sheets capture pests without chemicals and help you monitor insect populations

Unlike pesticides and other chemicals, insects cannot develop a resistance to stickiness - not any time soon, any way! Plus, sticky sheets do not cause harm to people or pets. The worst that can happen is they will stick to you temporarily. When an insect lands on the sticky surface, it means death. They cannot escape, reproduce, feed, or spread disease. They are done, and all you have to do is toss them in the trash.

​Yellow sticky sheets can capture a wide variety of pests, including: 

• apple maggots
• armyworms
• artichoke plume moth
• Asian citrus psyllids, which carry huanglongbing 
• citrus leafmining moth
• codling moth (budbreak; late March to early April)
• flea beetles
• fungus gnats, which carry black root rot
• navel orangeworm moth (mid-March)
• obliquebanded leafroller (early fruit set; mid-April)

• omnivorous leafroller (just before budbreak)
• onion flies
• orange tortrix (late December)
• stink bugs (early April)
• peach twig borer (March 20 - April1)
• peach tree borer (April - September)
• potato psyllids, which carry zebra chip
• thrips, especially citrus thrips, which carry spotted tomato wilt and up to 20 other viral diseases
• vine mealybugs (April - June)
• whiteflies

Yellow sticky sheet cut into flower shape to capture indoor pests

Yellow sticky sheets are often used in tandem with pheromone traps. The pheromones lure the insects closer and then the yellow sticky sheet makes them unable to fly away.

Whether you use a pheromone trap in conjunction with yellow sticky sheets or not, you can use the sticky sheets to monitor for pest populations in and around specific plants or beds.

Personally, I hang them in my citrus trees in early spring to significantly reduce leaf miner damage, and to help me know what else I happen to be up against at any given time.

​The best news about yellow sticky sheets? They’re cheap. And if you are having problems with indoors pests, you can always cut the sticky paper into a decorative shape and put it to work for your container plants!