Natural pesticide

I'm so glad that there are now an abundance of resources about organic gardening. Our outdated bookshelf still contains plenty of old gardening books that basically worship pesticides and fertilizers, which pretty much contradicts everything I'm reading in gardening books today, focusing on organic growing.

My mom has some rose bushes that over the past month have been sucked dry by aphids, green teeny flecks-of-an-insect that suck on the stems of plants, gaining nutrients for themselves, but depriving plants of food. My mom tried some natural remedies, like soapy water and rubbing alcohol, but nothing could get rid of these fleets of aphids.

So we tried something else.


We called in the troops! For $9.99 we purchased 10,000 ladybugs, which we released on our screened-in patio. A few days later, there were no aphids to be found! This little group of ladybugs found a dark home under the glass of a table.

It's been a couple of weeks, and there are still plenty of ladybugs around. Remarkably, there are still plenty of spiders hanging out on the rosebushes. These spiders would probably be dead had we used pesticide sprays, but instead, they're still around catching other pesky insects.