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.