Garden Insecticides

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:49:14 -0400

Neem for Garden Pests and Diseases

_¸,ø¤°' Neem trees simply growing in your yard provide wonderful shade and even better, slowly eliminate mosquitos and fleas from their territory.

_¸,ø¤°' Spread dried leaves around the house, outdoors or inside as strewing herbs to control insects. Add a few sprigs to your fruit basket both for decorative value and to deter fruit flies.

_¸,ø¤°' Keep a neem leaf just lying loose on the potting table when working there, and also dropped near your feet when mosquitos are thick in the nearby area. For walking around through fogs of them, put a neem leaf or two in a hat band, a pocket, or a shoe or sock. Or wad up a big leaf and scrub it over the skin of feet and lower legs.

_¸,ø¤°' Make up a special strong solution of neem oil, soap and water for bad critters in and around the garden like ants or slugs. It works! Sometimes a repeat application is needed. In the case of those ants with the big red butts, it took three sprayings to totally eliminate them when they were swarming.

_¸,ø¤°' Put neem oil with some soap and water in a hose end garden sprayer and do the whole yard every few months.

_¸,ø¤°' Spray sitting or picnic areas with the above before company is expected and no problem for quite a while.

_¸,ø¤°' Neem oil is the only thing I've ever discovered that really chases off fire ants. If you have some on your hands and feet, they climb up and go right back down. Perhaps would bite when I smell like that, but I'd rather smell funny than get fire ant bites. (Make sure it's the all-natural version, not the kind that's been formulated to spray though.) Neem oil is also a potent anti-inflammatory agent and makes the itch from fire ant, wasp or mosquito bites go away.

_¸,ø¤°' Neem cake works as a systemic pesticide, plus it chases squirrels out of flower pots and hanging baskets.

_¸,ø¤°' If your trees are good size, cut back the branches and use them as a mulch around plants that end up with bugs, particularly veggies. Although not as strong as the neem cake, the branches break down and become a systemic pesticide too, plus you get the water-saving benefits of the mulch. No need to break them up. Just lay them flat where you want them and then use the larger pieces for vertical vines once the leaves have all fallen off.

_¸,ø¤°' The general recommendation for neem is to mix a pound of neem leaves in a blender with a little bit of hot water. Strain it through the leg of an old pair of pantyhose and then hang it in a bucket with two or three gallons of water overnight. In the morning, mix a little bit of soap in the water and spray plants. Be sure to use the ground-up leftover neem as mulch on an extra-sensitive plant.

_¸,ø¤°' Neem trees grow well in Florida in the sun, in the ground where they have some frost protection, in containers farther north. Kathy and Wae Nelson (editor and publisher of Florida Gardening Magazine) and myself have large, thriving trees. Theirs are in Melbourne on the east coast and mine are near Tampa on the west. They grow quickly even in our sandy soil, more quickly the more humus and mulch used. If cold should nip them back, pick and save the brown leaves. Herbs are useful dead or alive.

Excerpt from Florida Gardening, the Newcomer's Survival Manual,
2nd Edition, by Monica Brandies
You may purchase the book and get much more gardening advice
from Monica at GardensFlorida.com

Relative Links or Downloads:

University of Connecticut, Integrated Pest Management
University of Florida, Natural Products for Insect Pest Management
DEET in Your Drinking Water? What Everyone Needs to Know

neem Garden pests bugs Insecticides

About Skin Repellants

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:11:41 -0400

If you've always used Deet-based (N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide) insect repellants,
you might want to reconsider.

Several organizations - including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the American Academy of Pediatrics - are now suggesting that Deet may not be as safe as you thought it was.

Consider the following quote from the EPA website on Deet:

"As long as consumers follow label directions and take proper precautions, insect repellents containing Deet do not present a health concern. Human exposure is expected to be brief, and long-term exposure is not expected."

The actual EPA report also requires manufacturers to remove child safety claims on products sold with low levels of Deet.

"The scientific data on Deet do not support product label claims of child safety based on the percentage of active ingredient."

Additionally, the report recommends deferring comment on products that contain both Deet and sunscreen, "since directions to reapply sunscreens generously and frequently may promote greater use of Deet than needed for pesticidal efficacy and thus pose unnecessary exposure to Deet."

Recognizing that mosquitoes and ticks carry disease - sometimes life-threatening diseases - the American Association of Pediatrics also supports the use of Deet. Even so, they have a series of warnings:

In formulations of less than 10 percent
Applied sparingly, according to product label instructions
Only to exposed skin, and not to a child's face, hands, or skin that is irritated or abraded.
After the child returns indoors, treated skin should be washed with soap and water.

Not exactly what you would call glowing endorsements, but they balance the danger of insects with the damage caused by smearing pesticides on your skin.

You can find several interesting articles on neem on the National Institutes of Health (a sister agency to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) database including a 1993 article from the Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association. The direct quote from that government-funded source reads:

"Two percent neem oil mixed in coconut oil, when applied to the exposed body parts of human volunteers, provided complete protection for 12 h from the bites of all anopheline (mosquitoes that carry malaria) species. Application of neem oil is safe and can be used for protection from malaria in endemic countries."

A report written by a committee of the National Research Council and published by the National Academy Press - also affiliated with the U.S. government - notes that neem "deters certain biting insects more effectively than the synthetic chemical called Deet." (See page 4.)

But is neem any safer? Tests required for agricultural use of neem as a pesticide also show that it is "practically non-toxic" even when rats are fed extraordinarily high doses. (Extension Toxicology Network)

Relative Downloads:

Relative Links:

We have found some great deet free alternatives in Neem Tree Farm's Botanical Outdoor Gel and Spray and Organix South's Herbal Outdoor Spray.
DEET in Your Drinking Water? What Everyone Needs to Know

About Skin Repellants

Using Neem

Garden Insecticides

About Skin Repellants