Not all insects are harmful, so applying insecticides indiscriminately, especially harsh pesticides that affect even beneficial insects and crucial soil bacteria, can have a detrimental effect on your local garden ecosystem.
CC BY 2.0 Barbara Eckstein
These natural and DIY pesticides are effective at helping to rid your crops of harmful critters, but safe enough to keep from poisoning you and your family.
There’s nothing like having a home garden to make you begin to appreciate the trials and tribulations of the farmers who grow our food. Between weather, weeds, and insects, not to mention the challenges of soil fertility, it can be an incredibly humbling experience to try to put food on the table with a home garden – especially when adhering to organic protocols that don’t rely on quick, yet potentially harmful, solutions, such as herbicides, pesticides, and conventional fertilizers. We’ve written previously about homemade herbicides, which can help you get a handle on noxious or invasive weeds without as much labor as hand-weeding. This time around, we’re taking aim at insect pests, which have the potential to…
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Great Article!
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Happy to share, Deb. Pests are a big problem in New Zealand because of our mild winters.
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Thanks for this informative article. The tomato leaf natural insecticide is new to me. I’ll give it a try when my tomato plants mature. Some months ago, I experimented with ground chili pepper to get rid of a persistent white fungus on one of my succulent plants. I ended up killing both the fungus and the plant. Bad idea.
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Let me know if it works, Rosaliene.
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