What is a good, organic way to keep the bugs from eating my basil plants?
♥♥♥His♥♥♥ asked:
I have researched this a little online but I haven’t really read anything organic. I haven’t seen any bugs actually on them but they have big bug bitten places on the leaves… help please! ♥♥♥
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I have researched this a little online but I haven’t really read anything organic. I haven’t seen any bugs actually on them but they have big bug bitten places on the leaves… help please! ♥♥♥
August 4th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Sometimes just some dish soap and water in a spray bottle will work, spray on the leaves and see if that works - it does tend to keep some of the insects off mine.
August 7th, 2009 at 3:04 am
I don’t know but I would try vinegar. It’s completely harmless and will probably make your plants seam unappetizing. Hopefully it wont taint the flavor of the basil though. I would suggest a 1/10 dilution in water or greater. Any stronger and it would have a grater chance of tainting the flavor i think.
August 8th, 2009 at 4:54 am
If that’s from Japanese beetles, you need to get traps for the beatles and put the traps at least 20 ft. from your plants. We have a huuuuuge Japanese beetle problem here and that’s the only thing that works for us.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:47 am
Tobacco spit. Buy some chew. (I prefer Red Man golden blend). Chew it , save the spit , mix with some water, spray on plants.
August 13th, 2009 at 3:52 am
I use Insecticidal Soap. It’s organic pesticide. It’s sold near all the other plant insecticides. I got some at Lowe’s recently, it’s called Insect Killing Soap, “Safer” is the brand name and it’s got seaweed extract in it also, an excellent fertilizer for plants and veggies.
August 16th, 2009 at 10:03 am
Do not use vinegar as it is a herbicide and will kill your basil plants.
Soap will work on soft bodied insect such as aphids or flea beetles but not on things like slugs (which is what I suspect is your problem as you are not seeing the critter doing damage and slugs work at night). For slugs you can hand pick (yes there is a big Ewww factor) and drop them in a container of salt of wood ash, You can makea 2″ wide perimeter of diatomacious Earth-DE (not the swimming pool kind) around your basil and that will keep the slugs off the plants. Be sure to replace the perimeter after it rains. To be sure it is slugs go out either early morning (just after dawn) or at sunset and if there are slugs they will be active. you will have to hand pick any on the plant as the DE perimeter will keep them confined to the plants.
When using any organic method to control insect damage you really need to know what it is eating the plants as most organic controls are pretty specific to the problem. Soap works on a few things, DE on others, and so on-very few controls are broad spectrum.