Insecticidal soap
Here’s a recipe for an inexpensive insecticidal soap that won’t harm your plants. This soap is effective on aphids, scale, and other soft-bodied bugs, but it won’t kill hard-shelled bugs — however, the garlic and onion is supposed to repel them.
Ingredients:
1/4 to 1/2 of an onion
2 T minced garlic
2 T pure castile soap (I use Dr. Bronner’s lavender - which contains oil as well)
1 1/2 quarts water
Put the garlic and onion in a mason jar or similar container. Pour boiling water over the mixture and let steep for 24 hours. Strain and add the soap to your mixture. Mix well and spray directly on the offending bugs. Best to spray on a calm day, early in the morning. For a little extra repellent action, you can bury the onion/garlic pulp where you have the worst bug problems.
PS You can plant chives next to your roses for an effective aphid repellent!
Herb spiral
Here’s a really cool idea for planting herbs: an herb spiral! The idea is to plant different herbs with different cultural needs in one permanent structure to create a beautiful, functional herb garden. With this, there’s no need to hide the herbs in the backyard. Looks like it wouldn’t be too hard to build, either. There are larger pictures available here. Also here, here, and here.
A book I’m reading offers these directions for building an herb spiral:
- Pile up a mound of soil/compost/manure about 3 feet tall and 5 feet across
- To save on topsoil, you can put a heap of rocks or subsoil at the base of the mound, then build over that.
- You can run a piece of irrigation tubing (1/4 or 1/2 inch) inside the mound, emerging from the top, and attach a mini-sprinkler
- Place fist- to head-sized rocks in a spiral pattern that winds from the bottom inward to the top
- Leave about a foot of soil between the tiers of the rock spiral
- Next, install the herbs. You can fit the same amount of plants into this space as you could in about 30 linear feet!
- Varieties that like hot, dry climates, like oregano, rosemary, and thyme, go on the sunny south side near the top. Parsley and chives, which prefer cooler, moister conditions, can go on the north side. Coriander (cilantro) can be placed on the east side, so it doesn’t get too much hot sun.
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