Getting Rid of Aphids

I don't like the sight of mass clusters of black aphids. They are somehow even more nasty looking than the green variety. When I see an entire plant taken over by the aphids, I usually just give up. I figured as long as they stay on one plant, they can have that one plant. I have pretty much lost my entire pot of chives to the black aphids.

I was over at my friend Annie's garden last weekend. While we were looking at her roses, we noticed some big fat aphids on them. Annie said that she'll need to make some solution to get rid of them. I asked her about the solution and tried it out last night. Today all the black aphids on the chives are gone and the aphids on the spinach are significantly less.


Here's the recipe to make an all natural aphids repellent:

2 drops of dish washing detergent
1 teaspoon each of the following:
baking soda, cooking oil of any kind, salt

Put the above items in a 24 oz. spray bottle and fill it with water, and you are ready to combat the aphids! It works!

Bugs

One of the side effects of becoming an urban farmer is that I became fascinated with bugs.

Bugs used to be something I only noticed when they got inside of the house. Usually I would either kill them or kick/chase them out. Once you start to grow your own food outside, you will start to notice all kinds of bugs. Now you can't kick them outside because they ARE outside. For that reason, I usually don't try to kill them. After all, they are where they are supposed to be - outside. However, in order to protect the result of your hard labor, you will start to observe the bugs. What are they? What are they doing to your fruits (or vegetables)? How to protect your crop from these bugs without using toxic pesticide? My very first tomato had a nasty worm inside. Gross! At the same time, I was so fascinated that I had to keep a picture of it.


You will start to appreciate beneficial bugs such as bees and ladybugs. Not only I appreciate honey bees, I respect these little fuzzy guys for spending their entire lives collecting pollen and help pollination during the process. Without them, we would have no honey and much less fruit to eat. That would be devastating for me. There is nothing like the sweetness of natural golden gooey honey.