This year I’ve decided to fight with the bad bugs from my garden using the neem oil as pesticide.
I found it on a cosmetic web-shop, it was the only shop where I could find it in a larger quantity, here I have 450 gr, which should be enough for a whole year of gardening.
The recipe to transform the neem oil into a pesticide is easy, you just need 1 L of slightly warm water, 5 ml of neem oil and 2 ml of liquid soap. Mix them by adding first the soap into the water and then slowly stir in the neem oil. Pour the mixture into a spray bottle and it is ready to use. Make sure you use the mixture within 8 hours as beyond that the ingredients will start to break down.
“Formulations made of neem oil also find wide usage as a biopesticide for organic farming, as it repels a wide variety of pests including the mealy bug, beet armyworm, aphids, the cabbage worm, thrips, whiteflies, mites, fungus gnats, beetles, moth larvae, mushroom flies, leafminers, caterpillars, locust, nematodes and the Japanese beetle. Neem oil is not known to be harmful to mammals, birds, earthworms or some beneficial insects such as butterflies, honeybees and ladybirds (ladybugs in US English) if it is not concentrated directly into their area of habitat or on their food source. It can be used as a household pesticide for ant, bedbug, cockroach, housefly, sand fly, snail, termite and mosquitoes both as repellent and larvicide. Neem oil also controls black spot, powdery mildew, anthracnose and rust fungi.” – source Wikipedia.
GreenZoneLife 