Sometimes, those pest control concoctions you can make at home do more harm than good.
Gardening can be expensive, and many people are looking at cutting costs by controlling pests with home remedies.
You need to be extremely careful with what you use and how you apply the products. Risks include accidentally controlling things you don’t want controlled, health problems for people and pets, and potential injury to your neighbors.
First, ask yourself, “Do I want to control the pests, or do I want to kill them totally because they’ve caused me nothing but horrendous grief as they have destroyed my wonderful roses?”
Controlling and killing aren’t the same. Controlling means managing the problem so damage isn’t that noticeable. There may be leaf spots and insect bites, but nothing you can’t live with.
Killing is eradicating. It’s more difficult. The wind can blow in disease spores. Insects will fly and crawl in. It’s like getting rid of every squirrel in your yard. Wait two minutes and the “nature abhors a vacuum” law comes into play.
Besides, while you might be controlling today’s diseases, insects or weeds but there are spores, eggs and seeds willing to develop tomorrow.
Second, if you go with total annihilation, you’ll probably destroy some of the good guys. You may think this collateral damage is acceptable, but the good guys often control many of the bad guys and you may end up with more problems than if you had done nothing.
For example, contact sprays that kill Japanese beetles could end up killing scavenger beetles or ladybugs, and then you get aphids or caterpillars.
Some home remedies are somewhat successful, but the biggest problem is the regulation of pesticides. Technically, any product you use to control, destroy or prevent pests may need to be licensed by the Environmental Protection Agency.
We know some products are great for controlling certain pests. You can find many of these control measures on the Internet. One thing that will NOT work is mixing gin and mustard to control black spot on roses. Again, it will NOT work.
Besides, it’s a waste of gin. It would cost Bombay, Beefeater or Heinz tens of millions of dollars to test the product to see if it works. And they don’t want the expense. They get enough sales without trying to control fungal diseases on roses.
That’s why the University of Illinois, Illinois Department of Agriculture which regulates pesticides in Illinois, and the EPA won’t recommend some of the home remedies, even if they might work.
Now, there are some things that can be done — sort of.
If you pour boiling water on the weeds in the cracks of your pavement, you’ll kill the weeds. It may be difficult to get the boiling water from the stove to the sidewalk without scalding yourself.
Salt has been used for centuries to control weeds in asparagus patches. This doesn’t give you carte blanche to use salt on all your plants. One problem with salt is it persists in the soil unless flushed with tons of water.
Insecticidal soaps are marketed as a safe means to control sucking creatures such as aphids, mealy bugs, scales and spider mites. The soap coats the body, blocking the breathing pores and destroying the waxy coat on their bodies, which causes them to dehydrate.
However, you can’t throw in teaspoons of your own soap and do the same. While you’ll control the insects, you probably will also control the plant.
What you can do is make the plants unpalatable for the creatures.
You can mix hot peppers, garlic, rotten eggs, old cabbage, gym socks and anything else that smells in a blender, diluting the mixture with water, and spraying it on the plant. If you wouldn’t eat it, chances are the insects, mites, rabbits and deer won’t touch it either.
The big problem is that most repellents don’t last, so you’ll have to reapply the products every week or after a good rain. And they may smell bad enough that your neighbors complain.
You can always squish insects with your fingers, foot or between two bricks if you are squeamish. You can prune off insect-infested leaves or knock them into a plastic bag that you dispose somewhere.
Trap slugs in containers of used beer (if you can find that), grapefruit halves or melon rinds at night, and destroy the creatures the next morning.
A heavy stream of water will wash off mites and aphids.
Improve air circulation by opening up limbs, branches and leaves on many plants to reduce diseases.
Mulches are still the best bet for weed control.