Pakistan Gardening Forum

Please suggest homemade pesticide for container plants, I read it somewhere that “ in one liter spray bottle mix a 2 spoons of vegetable oil and 2 spoons of dishwashing liquid and spray it on plants can prevent it from most common containers plants bugs such as Aphids, Spider mites and mealy bugs”, is this right or not? Please suggest….

Faisal,
You sound very enthusiastic about gardening, which is great. Yes a bit of mild liquid soap and water works depending on the severity of the infestation, have never heard of adding oil. Gardening requires patience, take it one step at a time.

Thanks for encouragement; yes I’m pretty excited about gardening. Patient is something I didn’t had in me, let’s see if I can have any benefit from it

Faisal, Welcome to the forum. Check this link for your Query. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=440

Thanks Khan sb.

faisalj75 wrote:Please suggest homemade pesticide for container plants, I read it somewhere that “ in one liter spray bottle mix a 2 spoons of vegetable oil and 2 spoons of dishwashing liquid and spray it on plants can prevent it from most common containers plants bugs such as Aphids, Spider mites and mealy bugs”, is this right or not? Please suggest….

I used to try some fancy combinations. Organic sprays are good for small scale applications, typically household plants:

1. The safest and cleaning one is boiling garlic cloves in water and straining it. The cooled extract works quite well. Aphids and mealy bugs die with garlic extract.

2. Another slightly messy but far more powerful than garlic is using a tobacco extract (by boiling tobacco leaves in water). However this solution is brown and stains the leaves temporarily. If you wish to know that how toxic is tobacco and its derivates (e.g. niswaar) are to certain animals including the humans, one can show that a normal sized snake die within few minutes when the snake is forcefully fed with it. I saw this "experiment" in the university where snakes were found in natural habitat.

3. The combination of vegetable oil and detergent does not make sense to me in terms of its chemistry. The detergent alone should be sufficient to wet the insects and drown them. I guess that the vegetable oil serves to suffocate the skin of the insects (insects breathe through their skin). If I were to experiment with this mixture I would wash the plant afterwards because detergent is not beneficial in any way and so is oil for the leaves.

Regards,

Farooq