homemade pesticide

Has anyone got a recipe for general purpose pesticides/funguicides made from non-toxic ingredients? I have to be very organic, not so much as an ideological choice, but simply because I have a toddler who will smell and lick anything in the garden.

I'm pretty sure something can be made from garlic...

 

Hi Idig,

There are such things but unfortunatly we can't discuss them on Gardeners Corner due to it being against EC law

 

I have a toddler too. Lucky for me he's starting to come out of the 'taste test everything' phase, although he still has the occasional relapse.

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to make sure nothing bad gets eaten is to keep a constant eye on them while at the taste test everything stage.

I'd originally set out with the plan of having a totally child safe garden, until I caught my son trying to eat:
* Pebbles
* Mud (that was a favorite of his)
* A filthy passer-by's cigarette end that had ended up in our garden
* Assorted unidentified small objects
* Bits of plants

I only use pesticides and herbicides as a last resort, and in fact I rarely even own any pesticides, and the only herbicide I use is Roundup, which we're assured is harmless to humans, but just as a precaution I don't let my son into the garden during or for about an hour after spraying. However its not so much chemicals that I'm worried about. I'd be more worried about the lad eating some of the plants that grow out there. After all, many common and 'tame' garden plants (as well as quite a few weeds) are quite toxic.

Best strategy is to just keep an eye open, and be assured that the 'taste test everything' phase shouldn't last too long.

 

Ah? Wha? Soaked garlic against EC law?? Where's this world going, Ziggy? BNP not against EC law and garlic is?? :runhills:

 

I think it was only last year, prompted by global food shortages, that the good old EU decided to let us eat bendy bananas again.

I read somewhere recently that soon most traditional medicines will be banned, so next time you see an old granny buying licorice sticks because she's feeling a bit unwell, we can cheer her up by making a citizen's arrest

 

Full agreement and total appreciation there Idig.

If I wasn't a mod I would now quote from Apocalypse Now, but I can't. But I think we all know it.

The law is ridiculous, but we have to protect the forum against any litigation.

Feel free to discuss the matter outside of any EU websites or blogs.

Apparently in America, they are allowed to make their own petrol.

We are not allowed to do that here in the UK.

 

absolutely agree with many things you say, but I do think chemicals are (generally) a lot worse than pebbles or even plants. Many so-called poisonous plants have to be eaten in rather large quantities to have any adverse effect (apart from runny poo), also little humans are often more resistant to these things as they are at the stage when they have to try everything, and their bodies are better at expelling dangerous stuff. Think of the last time you vomited and compare it to how often your toddler may vomit. Also they have a much faster metabolism than adults which helps too.

One example - when I was 7 months old I was seen playing with wasps over a number of days, got repeatedly stung to no ill effect. My mum who's a paediatrician (no less ) didn't see it as a problem and let me get on with it.

I read an interesting theory that the epidemic of allergies the developed world has been experiencing since around the 1950s could be largely due to the fact that we now keep too clean, therefore our immune systems which are programmed to attack an awful lot of potential dangers have little to fight, so they turn on those things which in previous generations of humans were perfectly safe. Like nuts for example. Another factor is that we clean with chemicals which leave residue on everything (especially if you don't rinse your dishes while washing up :WINK1 and then we injest them from our plates and cutlery, or they get through our skin off the clothes, etc. They then travel through our digestive tracts and kill the gut bacteria which are the foundation of our immune response.

I let my little tike eat pebbles as I've learnt over time, 1) I can't stop him anyway, 2) it's not doing him any harm at all. I do make him spit them out if I see him eat them, but i'm not worried if he does. I'd be more alarmed if he picked something up in the middle of the road, but in our garden where pebbles get washed with rain I'm not fussed.

He's well beyond the stage when he takes everything to mouth but he'll still chew on plants, oh - and stones

As a rule of thumb, anything you spray your plants with will stay there until at least the first rain, so a half-an-hour wait won't change much. And spraying just before rain kind of defies the purpose. So I'd prefer to just use something that is certainly not going to be toxic.

 

well, a family member who runs a distribution business got approached (more than once!) by companies selling equipment that converts rapeseed oil into diesel.

 

In Mexico, they use cow dong as fuel. Stinks but works

I've made wallpaper paste from cornflour and essential oils, am I gonna be jailed for that?

What's the next thing EEC/EU is gonna ban, playdough?

 

IDig, I agree with most of what you say, but be very careful with your theory that nibbling a bit of plant will do no more harm than a bit of vomiting. A common garden flower such as Foxglove for example, has the very real potential to be fatal. The poison in it acts on the central nervous system, effectively shutting down all the internal organs, and it only takes small quantities to do so.

I agree that most plants will do no more than give you a bit of a bad belly, but it is not a safe assumption in general that it takes large quantities to do serious harm.

 

Well they've now banned cough and congestion medicines from use in under 6-year olds, although it's still perfectly fine to give them a pint of calpol for tea if you suspect teething. Last time my toddler was fighting a persistent cough (lasted SIX WEEKS) my GP prescribed him ventolin, an asthma medicine. Bronchodilator to be precise. So a spoonful of cough mixture is bad for him apparently, and a bronchodilator (which alters the heart rate, among other side effects) is fine. I rest my case

 

No, I didn't say that plant eating is safer than vomiting, what I meant is, if you eat something bad your body expels it by a variety of means including vomiting. And children do tend to vomit much more often than adults, possibly because they come into contact with more unsafe stuff.

I don't assume that any plant is safe, but most plants are otherwise we woudn't be alive. I do agree with you that knowing the dangerous ones is the best way to go. However plants, on the whole, are quite safe, whereas MOST chemicals aren't. Because the poisons in plants are usually diluted (which is why we use medicinal plants - any medicine is very diluted poison), whereas most man-made chemicals are concentrated enough to cause harm.

 

You know what this is about Ziggy, it's simply the EU/EEC protecting capitalism. They want us to buy stuff, rather than get by with whatever we have handy. This is why people have gone nuts spending money on ridiculous stuff like BUBBLE MIXTURE (wtf???) rather than just mix water and detergent like you and I did when we were kids. No one seems to care that this BUBBLE MIXTURE is made in China with detergent from Indonesia and water from the local sewer, then bottled into plastic from oil extracted in Siberia and shipped to the UK. The average carbon footprint of a bubble is probably more than the average car these days. :wallbang:

The EEC has recently been trying to ban generic medicines produced cheaply in non-EEC countries unless the manufacturer can reproduce the expensive, totally unnesessary and often unethical trials that pharmaceutical giants carried out decades ago. Meaning that the poor - and even many of the middle class - wouldn't be able to afford an aspirin. Simply protecting their vested interest, that's what the EEC is all about. :gaagh::gaagh::gaagh:
I wonder whether that abomination ever went through, but I doubt it did, it would probably be all over the news.

 

Although the moderator should obviously know what he's talking about, on the issue of the EU banning discussions of home-made pesticides and fungicides, I still find it rather hard to believe. Can someone point me to the specific law that bans this? (I can hear my old law professor saying "quote your sources, quote your sources!") Thank you.