Grand Ammjays Fairview Inn

There are times when it just seems that there are much more insects than ever before. Maybe it is the milder winters and wetter summers allowing them to breed more easily, or maybe it is because not so many people are using insecticides in their gardens.

It is quite understandable that a great deal of people do not like to use chemicals on their gardens, but not using anything at all results in a boom in the insect population.

During the last fifty or more years, people had gotten more and more accustomed to using chemical insecticides to poison household and garden insect pests because they are a quicker and definite killer.

So what do you do if you want to manage the quantity of backyard insect pests, but do not want to use chemicals?

Well, you would have to go back to using natural insect pest killers, although most families have forgotten what their great-grandparents used to use to eradicate bugs. The following is a list of a few of the natural ways of killing insect pests. However, not all techniques or plants will be available in all countries.

Stinging nettles: if you cut down a clump of stinging nettles and immerse them in water for a week or more, chemicals will come out of the plants into the water. Strain the water off and spray it onto your plants. It will kill or put off a great deal of garden insects. You can also use it as a plant food, but you will have to be careful how concentrated 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 needs to be reapplied often in order to obtain the utmost impact. Do not use it near fish though.

Washing Up Water: soapy water of any sort will kill green fly along with other backyard insect pests. This is a very simple control to administer. Simply strain your soapy water into a spray gun (like an empty window cleaner spray gun) and blast your greenfly.

Corn meal: you can sprinkle this around plants or skirting boards to kill insects. If a tomato hornworm or a cockroach eats some, the corn meal| will swell up in the insect's stomach with the bodily fluids in there and the insect will eventually explode.

Pyrethrum: made from geraniums: will paralyze an insect, but it will also wear off, so it is often mixed with a poison to kill the insect off. Otherwise, you can pick them up.

A mixture of cow's milk, flour and water can| beutilized 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 asphyxiate.

Neem is a very widespread tree in India and has medicinal as well as insecticidal applications. This natural insecticide deters 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 most effectively of all on insects that mainly consume leaves.