DIY Natural Garden Pest Spray

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” ~ Margaret Atwood
For many of us, Spring means gardening. Spending our days in the warmth of the sun, tilling our soil and nurturing our plant babies.

Unfortunately, it can also mean pests. There’s nothing worse than spending weeks (or months) of effort caring for our plants, only to have them ravaged by bugs.
Fortunately, there are ways to deter pests and protect your beloved plants - without using dangerous chemicals.

There are some budget friendly essential oils that are very effective at repelling bugs, slugs, and snails without being harmful to you or your plants.

Here are a few:

Peppermint: a natural insecticide, this oil will work on ants, beetles, flies, fleas, aphids, and squash bugs, as well as repel spiders.

Cedarwood: this oil is great for keeping slugs and snails away.

Orange: because of it’s high limonene content this oil is lethal to flies, fleas, and fire ants. It also repels silverfish, roaches, and mosquitos!
Simply add 5 drops of each oil into a 4 oz spray bottle, and fill with water. Spritz on plants as needed (shaking before each application).
No scary chemicals, just natural protection.
Do you use essentail oils in the garden? Tell us your favorite natural methods for keeping pests away from plants.

0

DIY Naturally Scented Bodywash

One of the items in the hub’s Essentail Rewards order this month was Young Living’s unscented Bath Gel. It is SO hard to find unscented, green (as opposed to green washed) products at the store, so we were pretty stoked Young Living offered this.
We’re also stoked that just about everything YL sells is concentrated, so we knew we would get 3 bottles of body wash out of this one bottle, so we decided to make a his and hers, and then still have one bottle left over for whoever runs out first.

Here’s how we did it:
Divide the unscented bath and shower gel into thirds (we used foaming pump bottles, because natural soaps don’t have the chemical in them that gives them all the lather of standard soaps)
Then we chose our scents. I chose Peace and Calming, Patchouli, and Orange. Patchouli and Orange are already in  the Peace and Calming blend, but I just wanted to enhance those notes.
Jon chose Cypress, Cedarwood, and Northern Lights Black Spruce. Woodsy and manly, without smelling too much like a forest.

I used 2 drops of Peace and Calming, 1 drop Patchouli, and 1 drop Orange in mine.
Jon used 2 drops Cypress, 2 drops Cedarwood, and 1 drop Northern Lights Black Spruce in his.
Then we just filled the rest of the bottle up with water, shook it around to mix, and voila!!  Naturally scented, toxin free bodywash - at 3 for 1 pricing!!

Have you made your own naturally scented bodywash? What oils did you use?

0