Natural Ways Of Eradicating Insect Pests
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: crafts, flowers, gardening, hobbies, home improvement, insects, landscaping, leisure, nature, other, outdoors, pests, recreation, UncategorizedThere are occasions when it just seems that there are more insects than ever before. Maybe it is the warmer winters and wetter summers helping them breed more easily, or maybe it is because fewer people are using insecticides on their gardens.
It is quite understandable that a great deal of people do not want to use chemicals on their gardens, but not using anything at all results in a growth in the insect population.
Over the last fifty or so years, people have gotten more and more used to using chemical insecticides to kill household and garden insect pests because they are a faster and definite killer. So what can you do if you want to control the quantity of backyard insect pests, but do not like to use chemicals?
Well, you would have to go back to using natural insect pest killers, although most households have forgotten what their great-grandparents used to use to kill insects.
The following is a list of a few of the natural ways of killing insect pests. However, not all methods or plants will be obtainable in all countries.
Stinging nettles: if you cut down a clump of stinging nettles and steep them in water for a week or more, chemicals will leach out of the nettles into the water. Strain the water off and spray it on your plants. It will kill or discourage a great deal of backyard insects. You could also use it as a plant food, but you will have to be careful how strong it is.
Rotenone: is a natural insecticidal. It is made from the roots of the derris plant. It kills by damaging the stomachs of insects. However, it is rather slow-acting and has to be reapplied frequently in order to get the maximum impact.
Washing Up Water: soapy water of any sort will kill green fly amongst other backyard insect pests. This is a very easy control to dispense. Simply strain your soapy water into a spray gun (like an empty window spray gun) and blast your greenfly.
Corn flour: you can sprinkle this at the base of plants or skirting boards to kill insects. If a tomato hornworm or a cockroach eats some, the corn flour will swell up in the insect’s stomach with the bodily fluids in there and the insect will eventually pop.
Pyrethrum: will paralyze an insect, but it will also wear off, so it is frequently mixed with a poison to kill the insect off. Otherwise, you can pick them up.
A combination of cow’s milk, flour and water may be used as a natural pesticide, funnily enough. It is very efficient at killing the eggs of insects. It also destroys insects themselves by clogging their breathing holes. In other words, they suffocate.
Neem is a very common tree in India and has medicinal properties too as insecticidal applications. This natural insecticide repels insects by means of an active constituent that mimics an insect hormone. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, to digest food and it blocks their cycle of reproduction. It works best of all on insects that primarily eat leaves.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on numerous subjects, but is currently concerned with Insect Removal. If you want to know more, visit our website now at Pest Management at Home.
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