How to Make Your Home and Garden Greener with Natural Pesticides

How do you get any "greener" than being in your garden surrounded by flowers, fruits, and vegetables? By using eco-friendly critter and pest control solutions.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Items found in kitchen cupboards
• Simple items found at a home improvement center or market
• Plants you'll find in most nurseries
• Essential Oils

1. 
    
   Welcome the good bugs into your garden

   Instead of altering your gardens "green" state with harmful commercial chemicals and toxic poisons, use repellant and insecticides that are kind to mother nature. Your goal is to get rid of or deter the harmful creatures away from your home and garden while not hurting the good ones or the people you love. Insects like ladybugs, butterflies, and bees are an important part of your garden. You want to welcome them without harming them.

2. 
    

   Many of these natural pesticides or treatments are good for indoor use as well as outdoors in your garden and around your home. However, there are some that you may only want to use in the garden and not inside your home like garlic spray.

3. Some treatments are deterrents that keep pests away by smell or taste and do not kill them, while others may result in death. Death comes as a result of being suffocated or by a natural reaction with the pests chemistry or by dehydrating them. Depending on how much of a naturalist you are, you can choose which methods work best for you.

4. 
    

   Battling Ants, Fleas, Lice, Bed Bugs, Ticks, Roaches, Earwigs, and pretty much anything that crawls:
   
   Diatomaceous Earth or DE– Going natural for pesticides starts here with Food Grade DE. It’s one of the eco-friendliest and efficient ways of keeping crawling bugs away from your home inside and out. DE is fantastic for the benefit of being non-toxic to humans and animals so you don’t have to worry about poisoning your children, pets or wild life (except bugs). It’s not a poison so bugs can’t build an immunity to it. So it is continuously effective year after year. However, there are a few down falls in using this wonder powder. One- it can’t distinguish between good bugs and bad. If a ladybug happens to crawl around your garden where you’ve put DE, it will die too. This happens with bees as well. If a bee lands on a plant leaf that’s been dusted with DE then it too can be harmed. Keeping the dusting to the lower leaves of a plant and away from flowers can help reduce the risk of harm to bees. Not dusting plants that Ladybugs love like roses, will help to keep them alive.
   
   Instead use ladybugs as the bug police over aphids on roses. Purchase a container of ladybugs at your local nursery and release them into your garden to keep your aphids under control.
   
   Inside your home: use in cupboards, around openings where pests get in, doorways, and in your carpet for fleas. A light dusting, on your mattress will control for bed bugs. Put some on your pets, their bedding, and where ever they frequent to rid your pets and your home of fleas and ticks. If head lice ever come around, treat them too by dusting infested heads with DE. This will kill the bugs (then treat hair with mayonnaise to get rid of the eggs). After treating hair then treat your couch, carpet, stuffed animals, mattresses, pillows, and anything else where lice might hang out, with a coat of DE. It may be a little dusty around your home for a few days, but you'll relieve your home of bugs safely.
   
   IMPORTANT: When purchasing DE (Diatomaceous Earth) get it in the food grade type only to keep it non-toxic (not pool filter DE). Buying it online is one of the most convienient ways to get it.

5. 
    

   Essential Oils as Pesticides & Insect Repellant
   
   An essential oil is any concentrated, hydrophobic liquid containing volatile (meaning vaporizes quickly) aroma compounds from plants, which are called aromatic herbs or aromatic plants otherwise known as Aroma therapy. Many oils help to deter pests from coming near you, your home, or wherever the scents are present with out causing death to the pests. Caution: Pregnant women should consult with their doctors before using.
   
   In your garden these essential oils work best: Tea Tree, Lavender, Eucalyptus, Lemon Balm, Thyme, Oregano, Basil, Rosemary, Tansy, Spearmint, Citronella, and Peppermint. There are others, but these are the most commonly used by themselves or in combinations with each other. When purchasing essential oils only buy the 100% pure oils. Mix 2 quarts of water and 20-30 drops of the essential oils of your choice (peppermint, lavender, and rosemary are great general purpose bug repellant). Using a spray bottle, fill the bottle with your mixture and mist your garden. Be sure to shake the bottle a few times while applying. You can also apply many drops of essential oils to a piece of cloth and lay or hang the cloth around your garden. The oil will be present in the air to keep the pests away.

6. 
    

   Plant Herbs and Other Plants That Help Each Other
   
   You can plant herbs or plants that compliment each other in the garden. By planting Marigolds, lemon grass, neem tree, cosmos, thyme, basil, rosemary, geranium, mint (pots are best since mint goes wild), rue, tansy, and oregano around your garden borders, or in between the other plants keeps pests away from each other naturally. Asking your local nursery which plants are native to your area will help you to determine what to grow.

7. 
    

   Garlic, Onion, & Green Chiles -
   
   Sounds like a good start to dinner. Actually it's a great recipe for one of the best and easiest to use deterrents or pesticides for your garden. You can plant garlic and onions in your garden to ward off pests with their aromatic scents or you can make a mixture of garlic, onion, and green peppers to spray on your plants. In a blender add a couple habeneros peppers (or any really hot peppers), a large onion (chopped up), a whole bulb of garlic cloves (peeled), enough water to blend the ingredients together into a mush. After all is mixed and blended cover with a gallon of warm water and let stand 24 hours then strain. Pour mixture into a spray bottle and mist your infested plants. Repeat daily until pests are gone. You may want to try spraying a little on a few leaves first to make sure you don't get a bad reaction on your plants. Keep all unused mixture in the refrigerator for freshness. Since garlic is a broad spectrum natural insecticide, it will kill beneficial insects as well as the pests. Spray only the affected areas where pests are doing most damage. Organic compounds like allicin found in garlic, capsaicinoids derived from green chilies and sulphur compounds extracted from onion give the pesticide the strength to fight the pests.

Tips & Warnings

• Caution: Pregnant women should consult with their doctors before using any essential oils.
• Just because something is labeled "natural" doesn't mean it won't or can't cause harm to humans or animals. Always be safe with herbs and essential oils, use them with logic and good sense. Don't apply essential oils directly to skin. Always dilute them with water or a "carrier" oil before applying.

Resources

• eHow Home and Garden Topic Guide