Lovely Garlic Fire

Whether you’re a garden bed gardener, you use pots, pallets, or raised beds, we all are in the same boat. Pests! How do I get rid of them? How do I keep them away? What do I use? What’s safe? I have thought it all before.

I look up each pest that I find in my garden (or I look up each veggie to see what its particular pest is), and how to deal with it. It's time consuming, it's annoying, and it doesn’t always seem to help. I try to plant herbs around the outside boarder of my garden to keep pests out, and trust me, this helps. But it doesn't keep them all away.

Using pesticides means attacking butterflies, bees, and all sorts of pollinators, and putting god-knows-what into my family's diet, so that's not an option for me. But I've found the Lovely Garlic Fire recipe! It's made with old table scraps, boiled down and then just sprayed on your plants, and the smell drives the pests out with no toxic pesticides.

Ingredients: 

about ½ an onion; the scraps work well

2-4 garlic bulbs

1 tablespoon red pepper seeds that you have scooped out for a recipe

1½ teaspoons Eco-friendly liquid detergent
7 cups water

Directions:

1. Place all ingredients into a pot, except the dish soap.
2. Boil about 5 min.
3. Let mixture cool. As it cools, stir in dish soap.
4. Strain through cheese cloth, and compost the leftovers.
5. Pour the liquid into a spray bottle, and spray liberally over your garden plants. Be careful when spraying around the new plants; it can sometimes damage the very young ones, so just spray the soil around the base of the plant, not directly on it.

Lovely Garlic Fire is pungent stuff, but the smell dissipates quickly once it's been sprayed. This garlic fire mixture needs to be re-sprayed often, as well as after rain or if there’s heavy dew in the morning. It's best to spray every few days or until there are no sign of pests, then about every week to 10 days for any eggs or larva that may have hatched out.

P.S. 

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