Safe, effective, organic homemade pesticides

Troubleshooting
1

I want to share my homemade pesticides that I used for nearly 3 decades on my vegetable garden that is safe and effective. I must say it’s very satisfying to see those bugs dies painfully on contact with my spray.

Equipments you’d need
Granite mortar and pestle (blender is alright but crushing is more effective than cutting ingredients)
Strainer
pitcher
spray bottle

Ingredients
3-5 fat cloves of garlic
3-5 hot chili pepper, I use Thai pepper. Jalapeno would do, habenaro is great and you need only 1-2
1/2 tsp Liquid dishwashing detergent
1 quart water

I use fresh ingredients. There’s potent volatile juice in these that will evaporate if you dry them.

I smash garlic a little to crack the skin, then take the skin off and put the garlic back into the mortar and pestle to pound the garlic until it’s well pounded. Because there’s lots of liquid in the garlic and when you first hit it with the pestle, there might be some splatter. I’d rather get splashed (usually on my face or eyes) by just garlic juice than garlic & chili pepper juice. Once the garlic is well broken up, it won’t propel the splash that much.
Then add a couple of fresh chili pepper, pond together until pretty well pulverized. You can use just these two or you can further add coarsest chopped mint leaves (my newest addition after seeing your ‘liquid lady bug’ ingredients.
I just add tap water into the mortar (from the hot side and let it mix to be warm water to be more pungent), so it’ll rinse it off too. I poured it into one quart Pyrex measuring cup (because it has pouring spout) trough strainer. You can use any pitcher but the plastic might absorb garlic scent and gets into your punch later. Then pour it into spray bottle. You can add more water to the strained off herbs if you want to. When I got all my veggies going, I need 3 spray bottles to cover them all so I’d use at least half a head of garlic plus half a fistful of hot chili pepper. I got lots of essential oils so this time I added a few drops of it into the mix as well as crushed a handful of mint leaves in it. I also got citronella and palmarosa oil. Will add those next time.

If your infestation is heavy, repeat it 2-3 times/week. These are volatile gas coming out of the herbs so they don’t last forever. That’s the disadvantage compare to store bough stuff but it’s cost you almost nothing to make.

I can guarantee you those pests will die on contact because capsaicin in chili pepper is very toxic to them. I just sprayed them yesterday and today I used my lupe to check and saw a lot of dead bodies on the plants, white spider mites, orange spider, aphids, and some black spot, too smal for my magnification glass. But there’s no live bugs on the plants. I spray them 2-3 times/week now as it gets warm these bugs come out from woodwork to feast on my plants.

I’ve been slaughtering these on my tomatoe plants for decades and manage to keep growing organically for decades and never need to buy pesticides anymore.

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Your the best @Ning, have yet to use it but I can’t wait to kill some mites!

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Haha, thanks. Try it even you don’t see them. Especially outdoor, they can hide when they sense you’re near by. I was surprised to see many dead bodies because I didn’t think there was any. By the time you can see the infestation, they already made colony and hide eggs somewhere which will survive the spray. Those little buggers will come back after you killed the parents.

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I was away for almost a month and my plants were eaten alive! The cannabis are alright but my tomatoes were near death from these damned mites. I spent most of my 4 days break back home spraying, trimming dead leaves off my tomatoes. The next two days, there were still webs they rebuilt. So I was in murderous mode! I got my Isopropyl alcohol out and spray them straight in between the pepper-garlic juice.

That’s when I got my AHA moment!

Capsaicin is very soluble in alcohol and fats. You might have heard to drink milk or alcoholic beverages if you ate something too spicy hot than you can handle.

So I pounded up a new batch of garlic and pepper, and pour isopropyl alcohol (70% rubbing alcohol) into my mortar and used up a quart bottle of it. (Costco sells twin pack of one-quart size bottles for $3.99). Then strained and sprayed as usual. My tomatoes looked so happy the next day before I had to leave again. I’ll be home this weekends and will update the results of it has killed more than water solution but I’m pretty sure it works better.

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We use this for possums in Australia

Jerry Coleby-Williams has always encouraged natural predators to his garden and managed pests naturally, but the possums are eating his Cassava and he is determined to deter them.

Cassava is the 5th most important carbohydrate crop in the world but it also contains cyanide, so the leaves need to be boiled before eating and sometime the roots need soaking and processing. But that doesn’t seem to affect the possums!

Luckily, Jerry also has ‘Ghost’ chilli growing, and his Atomic Chilli Spray works perfectly! ‘Ghost’ pepper is rated at more than 1,000,000 on the Scoville Scale, compared to 10,000 for Jalapenos.

Make sure you use gloves and protective eyewear when chopping chillies or applying the spray - and don’t touch any sensitive areas of your skin until your hands etc have been washed thoroughly.
You’ll Need:

4 cups of water
1 1/2 cloves of garlic
2 drops of dishwashing liquid
1 teaspoon of 'Ghost' chilli powder
A funnel, cloth, atomiser, blender and measuring cups and spoons
Personal protection equipment such as gloves and protective eye wear

Method:

Place 1/2 cup of water in a blender
Add garlic and puree with water
Add 3 1/2 cups more water, the dishwashing liquid and chilli powder; pulse blender to mix then allow it to sit for 24 hours to steep
Pour through a cloth-lined funnel to filter out any particles
Add to atomiser and use on susceptible plants as required

Capsaicin, the active ingredient in chilli, doesn’t affect any animals other than mammals so is harmless on beneficial insects, fish and birds. You’ll need to respray plants after rain - and wash any edible crops before using.

This method is designed to deter possums by making the target plant unappealing.

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Thanks for sharing. Yeah, Bhut Jolokia or Ghost pepper is the hottest peppers around.

Your recipe is pretty much like mine. The hotter the pepper, the more potent it will be. I find most animals don’t like the smell of garlic either. So I’ve used this juice to spray my plums and apricot to keep the birds and squirrels off and it worked pretty well.

Extracting capsaicin with rubbing alcohol increases the potency if he mix so much higher as capsaicin is well soluble in alcohol.

I had problem because I had to be away for almost a month and the plants were left on their own.

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Yeh the dishwashing liqiud is great for combining the ingredients, the recipe was off TV this guy is a wizard at all natural remedys that are tried and tested, google his name jerry Coleby-Williams and it will lead you to more tips i am sure. :+1::kangaroo:

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I use a basic recipe like this but I use grain alcohol and mineral oil as both are edible so no worries about residue.

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Mineral oil is from petroleum I wouldn’t use it at all but that’s just me.
Look it up and read and make your own informed decision.

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So if using Alcohol instead of water as the base…dish soap isn’t needed correct?

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The ETOH is the solvent for capsaicin. I also use it to make CBD oil. Pepper spray can be used just check the ingredient list for what medium they use.

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What is ETOH?

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I’m sorry, ETOH is the medical term for alcohol. The reason I don’t like dish soap is it’s made with propylene glycol more commonly known as anti freeze.

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The purpose of the dishwashing soap was so that the the fluid will stick into the leaves longer. I didn’t add it when I use iso as solvent. I haven’t tried adding the soap with it yet as I want to see how effective alcohol was. You could play around with it. After I did the alcohol, I had to leave again and just got back on Friday

I had another problem as the corn I grew to cover my outdoor plants finished its life cycle but my 10’ plant just start flowering. So I have to figure out how to replace the cover crop.

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Have a look at the contents of Dr Bronners range its what i use :kangaroo::+1:

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Looks like good stuff.

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I use the baby formula no scents added, we use it for everything around the house etc.

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I tried a mix with alcohol last year. Plants didn’t like it at allcan’t remember exact formula. How much alcohol and what stregth do you use. Trying to treat whiteflies and. caterpillars.

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@AAA has some caterpillar time with his outdoor grows. Not sure about whiteflies but he may be able to give you some ideas.

I haven’t had to deal with either of those just the good old spider mites

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Look up whiteflies and earthworm castings. We have WFs in our line tree and I’ve been top dressing with castings and it’s helping. Castings contain chitinese(SP?) which when a plant uptakes it and a whirfly ears it it rots there stomach.

For caterpillars I spray Monterey BT, it’s a bacteria that upsets the cats stomachs.

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