Herb Garden - What to do if You Have Pest Problems

Amy Stewart: Hi! I am Amy Stewart with Project Wellness. In this segment, I am going to give a great option for taking care of your plants should they get bugged or pest problems.

Very often, herbs have built-in pesticide, so you really dont need to use a pesticide or anything like that on it unless your herbs have a problem and, which is I said they very rarely do. A lot of times people will use herbs in their gardens around other plants, but when theyre doing a vegetable garden because herbs really are fantastic, have just natural resistance. However, in the event that you end up with a problem, youre going to want to use something that you would eat basically, which is not going to be a 100% no matter what you choose.

So, there are lots of different preparations that you can use, the only one that I have found that I will use that comes from a commercial farm store, home store or wherever and you cannot always find it, is the brand called Safer and you basically just buy a concentrate, and this much will make gallons and gallons and gallons of pesticide, and as I said youre not going to want to use it unless you end up with a problem. You can read, I am going to get this opened so you can see all pesticides that are commercially available have product information just like pharmaceuticals do, that will tell you what is in them and what to use them for, indications, of course, also if you end up with them in your eyes or something like that.

Now, this is definitely by far safer than most of the other stuff that youll find, but you may also want to do some additional research if you are terribly sensitivity.

So, heres what were going to do.

Since this is a concentrate, we do need to make sure that we get the right ratio, and I have already put water into a spray bottle, these you can of course find at the farm store or home store or wherever, and I have a handy-dandy tablespoon measure, and for this particular mixture I am going to just simply use one tablespoon to my 24 ounces of water.

So, there you are. So you can see we havent used very much. We go ahead and get that mixed up nicely. One other thing about insecticidal soap, which is what this is called again about the stuff is, youre going to want to use it relatively soon after you make it. So, this is not something youre going to want to make and then keep it around all summer. You will want to just make sure that you get rid of it in a safe way. So, now that youve got your pesticides already mixed however, if you did have bugs or pests that were bugging your herbs, you can of course spray them gently with your spray bottle, thats all ready to go.

Thats what to do in the unlikely event, thats your herbs get bugs or pests.