I'm from Buenos Aires and I Say KILL 'EM ALL!

There's still snow on the ground and my seedlings and young plants have been beset by a nefarious plague.

Remember the good old days when chez Dirt Gently's was a sea of green and the only worry was a spot of unsightly fluffy white fungus? Oh, how good it was to be blissfully innocent!

It seems that the plants in the propagation and germination station have been overrun with leafhoppers turning the propagation and germination station into a miniature version of Klendathu. Sadly, my foes weren't even the cool-looking multi-coloured ones (leafhoppers, that is, not arachnids). Instead, these guys:

Know your foe: Leafhopper

The little buggers laid waste to the jalapeno peppers, bacopa, cape daisies, moonflowers and bok choi. Thankfully, the datura and spinach have been spared; while I've found a few bugs on these young plants, they have mostly been undamaged.

The field of battle

The adult and young bugs suck the juice from the undersides of leaves, leaving behind a payload of toxic saliva that causes leaf burn, "windowpanes" in the leaves where they feasted and, in young shoots, causes leaf distortion.

Broken windowpanes

A little crooked

Leafhoppers especially like to hang out along thick veins on the underside of leaves, on the apical meristem where they'll royally mess up your new growth, in the crotches between the main stem and petioles on my bok choi, and at and just below the crown. Basically, if it's a hard to get at area, leafhoppers live there.

Is a live and let live policy preferable to war with the bugs? Maybe, if I could rely on predator insects to knock these little bastards off. But it's much too cold for the bugs that like to eat 'em to be very active.

I applied neem oil to the tops and bottoms of the leaves as thoroughly as I could, and spent considerable time daily manually squashing the bugs, but my efforts appeared to be futile. As a last resort, I drenched with insecticidal soap. This burned the plants and left holes in the leaves where there once were "windowpanes."

I've quarantined these plants again, leaving the germination station rather bare. I'm debating destroying the affected plants as I can't seem to get rid of the bugs, and two flats of newly germinated seedlings to protect. The other alternative is to leave the plants outside for a day, hoping that the cold kills off the bugs but not the plants. What do you think?