July 16, 2011: Garden Recipes

A few weeks ago I shared with you my recipe for a natural insecticide to use on your garden vegetables. I had some difficulty with the formula and/or the spray bottles; for some reason the spray bottles I used (there were two of them) refused to work after a couple times. I’m still not sure if the problem was the liquid I put into them or the bottles themselves.

In search of a new recipe to combat the grasshoppers which are getting fat and happy on my peas and corn and beans, I decided to try sprinkling a bit of hot red chile powder directly on the plants. Voila! This has worked exceptionally well and it’s a very economical solution.

If you can’t find red chile powder, which is dried red chile pods ground up into a fine powder, in your locale, try using whatever is available in your local market. Asian chilis are even hotter and if you can find them at a good price, you could pop them into the blender and sprinkle that over your veggie plants.

With a dismal start to our garden, we decided to go a more conventional route than sprouting seeds and stopped at a nursery just down the street from our house, Sweet Corn Organic Nursery. There we picked up several different types of tomato plants, fennel, lemon balm and lemon basil. We opted to go with a container garden rather than plant them in our garden plot, which needs a lot of help (we’re striving for having the soil ready for next year’s garden).

While we were at Sweet Corn, we talked at some length with the young man tending the nursery. He was the one who let us know it was grasshoppers having a buffet with our vegetable plants. He also said a lot of his customers spray a mixture of water and dishwashing liquid (dish soap) on their plants and have had a lot of success with that. From my experience, that is a great formula for getting rid of those little white flies that like roses and other plants.

So there you go – two new recipes for natural insecticides. After all, why go the bother of planting your own garden only to taint the vegetables with a commercial poison?

Good luck and good eating!