neem oil spray – GKVKs – Gardening Tips and Store

NEEM OIL SPRAY FOR PLANTS – HOW TO USE?

admin — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 04:10:50 +0000

In Today’s post, we will look into some amazing miracles of Neem oil in gardening. We will also learn what is Cold Pressed and Heat pressed neem oil and which neem oil works best for your gardening needs. Plus we will also learn how to use neem oil in your garden with some of the tested and most effective formulae or combinations.

Neem oil is a vegetable oil extracted from the Miracle Tree – that’s the Neem Tree. The botanical name of neem tree is Azadirachta indica. Azadirachtin and Nimbin found in neem oil are the two major compounds responsible for its antibacterial and antifungal actions.

This neem tree is native to the Indian subcontinent and can be easily grown at home gardening level even in large containers.

Before we discuss on which Neem oil you should purchase for best efficacy in gardening, we will list out the best uses of neem oil for your plants and gardening.

Its Byfar the best Organic Pesticide available worldwide. It has an excellent safety profile and the best efficacy to treat a large number of pest attacks on your plants. It is infact a broad spectrum pesticide effective on pests like Aphids, Mealybugs, Whiteflies, Caterpillars,leaf miners, fungus gnats, Thrips and mites, Greenflies, Grasshoppers and other Scale insects. It kills pests in all their lifecyle stages like the adult stage or the larval stage.
It has the Anti bacterial, anti viral and anti fungal properties not only for use on plants but also prescribed for humans and pets for various skin and hair problems.
Its also effective on Slugs and snails which eat away a lot of your garden overnight. I have an important episode to identify some hidden pests and insects in garden by examining the leaf signature they leave after feeding on the leaves. You can watch that episode from a link in the video description or from an end screen.
It highly Effective in the Treatment of Black spot Rose disease, Rose die back disease and Powdery mildew. We have detailed episodes on each of these plant diseases and problems. You can watch those episodes from the description links.
Neem cake is an excellent organic fertilizer for your plants. Neem cake is the by-product left over after the process of extraction of neem oil from neem seeds or neem fruits. Its not only a source of NPK and micro nutrients for plant growth, but when mixed with soil acts as a soil conditioner and also antibacterial and antifungal. You can avoid fungus gnats if you incorporate about 10 percent neem cake powder in your potting mix.
last but not the least is, unlike the chemical pesticides, It does not affect the beneficial pollinators like butterflies and honey bees which are so important for a fruitful gardening.

Now, we will discuss the most important aspect of this video, based on which the quality, composition and efficacy of neem oil depends – that’s the method of extraction of neem oil from seeds.

There are three methods:

Heat Pressing method.
Solvent extraction method and
Cold Press method.

Heat pressing method – as the name implies, its using heat for crushing or pressing the seeds to extract oil.

Solvent extraction means using a solvent like alcohol is used to extract neem oil. This solvent extracted neem oil usually has a low price, because it is turbid and contains a significant amount of water and metals with low content of the important compounds namely azhadiractin and nimbin.

Heat extracted neem oil also has moderate loss of the useful compounds and less effective.

Whereas the Cold pressed Neem oil extracted without applying any heat, is the best and effective source for neem oil. So, when you are purchasing from a local garden store or online, make sure you check the method of extraction mentioned on the bottle or product description. You can purchase cold pressed neem oil here.

How to use Neem oil properly for the best effects?

Before I start with the neem oil recipes for plants, the safety profile of neem oil. It has few effects when concentrated form is ingested like stomach irritation causing gastritis and vomiting. Then Eye irritation and contact dermatitis can develop on contact specially in children. Otherwise it has an excellent safety profile and its completely biodegradable.

Now the recipe for Neem Oil you can make at Home.

Before this, few important points you must remember:

Because it’s an oil, it doesn’t mix well with water and must be mixed with some kind of surfactant like liquid soap or even shampoo for proper mixing and the coating effect on the plant leaves.
Make sure you do not spray neem oil during the sunlight – best time to spray is in evenings after the sun fades.

To Make the best broad spectrum PESTICIDE FOLIAR SPRAY FORMULATION for 1 litre:

Take 1 litre Warm Water and add 10 drops of liquid soap like your handwash or even some shampoo. Then you add 5 ml to 10 ml of Neem oil into this. 5 ml if you want to spray as a maintenance pesticide spray for your garden where you do not have much pests.
10 ml if you have lot of pests on your plants.

Mixing this thoroughly before use is very important.
Perform a PATCH TEST to know how strong it is. This means you Just spray this on one or two leaves and then wait for a couple of hours to see if the leaf is wilting or burning due to too much concentration of neem oil. If you pass the patch test, you can spray it on your whole garden safely. Patch test may be important for newbie gardeners or if you have purchased a new brand of neem oil from some company for the first time.

Also make sure you spray the underside of the leaves as well.

How frequently should I use neem oil? Depending on the severity of pests, use it twice a week for pest eradication phase and then weekly once for 1 or two months and finally if everything is clean use it once every 15 days as a preventive measure.

Happy Gardening!

Top 7 Best Natural Pest Control Methods – Organic Pesticides

admin — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 04:21:59 +0000

In today’s Article, I shall be listing the best natural ways for your plant pest control needs and they are really very easy to implement and 100 percent safe and organic pest control methods. The last gardening hack will eliminate more than 80 percent pests in just one single shot, specially those resistant aphids, mealybugs, spider mites, whiteflies and many other bugs in your garden.

The main idea behind these methods is, this saves me a lot of time and Time is really precious!

Here s a list of few easy methods I use. These include natural pesticides and other simple methods.

1. Grow Plants Full of Health and Vigour: Yes, Regularly Adding organic composts like vermicompost, decomposed cowdung or horsedung on your top layer of soil is the best way to develop strong and vigorous plants which can resist or withstand these pest attacks. I also mix organic neem seed meal powder into the soil which combats many pathogens in the soil and also neem cake is a natural fertilizer with many micronutrients.

2. Keep Pest Repelling Plants in your garden. This is infact an easy way of keep many pests away including mosquitoes. You have to do this strategically – like placing these insect-repelling plants near entrances and also interspersed between your other plants which are more prone to pest attacks. There is a long list of such plants – I have listed out these names in these slides on the screen. This is taken from Wikipedia website. CHECK HERE.

3. Trimming or Pruning the Affected Leaves or branches. This step is really important because this has two benefits. This will reduce the load of pests to be eliminated by a pesticide and also offers the benefits of pruning a plant, that is giving out more branching.

4. Hand Pick and Eliminate. This is actually the best method to eliminate some worms and insects like caterpillars, slugs and snails and other leaf eating worms.

5. Neem Oil Spray: This is by far the most widely accepted natural pesticide spray worldwide. When you have lot of pests, spray your plants thoroughly once weekly or atleast once in 15 days. Then a maintenance or prophylactic dose of once a month if you have no pests in your garden. The Formula is Add 5 ml Pure Neem oil in 1 litre of water + some 10 drops of any liquid soap for the surfactant effect and to coat the leaves. Do a patch test on a leaf and then spray the whole garden. WATCH a Detailed Video HERE.

6. My Cocktail Organic Pest Spray: If your plant pest load is too high, consider using a mixture of multiple natural oils and other stuff to make a cocktail pesticide spray. I have discussed this recipe in detail in my video titled Universal Pesticide recipe. You can check this VIDEO HERE. What I used is a mixture of Clove Oil, Neem Oil and Optionally Eucalyptus Oil and then liquid soap. This is a really powerful organic pesticide solution. And again, Always do a patch test on a leaf to check the result before applying on entire plant.

7. And FINALLY, the Best method of pest control which can eliminate more than 80 percent of pests in 1 single shot. When we see these pests damaging our beloved plants, am sure we all feel like burning them to death. But we are helpless, we cannot burn our plants. You can only burn the cut out branches and leaves loaded with pests, which is infact the best way to prevent contamination to other plants. Incineration or burning is one of the best sterilization methods.

So, The only best way is to either kill them on the plants without damaging our plants or somehow dissociate them from our plants. Yes, This method is to separate these pests from our plants. I will demonstrate how powerful this is, so keep watching. Yes, Am talking about the high pressure water spray in misting mode using your garden spray gun with the correct pressure. I will reveal you everything now. How I experimented many methods to finally settle on this method and also the other benefits of this method. First of all there is absolutely no water pressure on your teres garden, because overhead tanks are sitting on the teres or slightly above it. I am sure all of you agree with me on this point. Most of us must be using the bottle spray to pump or spray pesticides which is a manual method to spray with very little pressure and with lot of effort and time and energy consuming specially if you have too many plants. To overcome this, First I started with the rechargeable battery operated 16 litre sprayer can. This was actually a good option with good pressure and other benefits like portability and things like that. But I wanted to connect my multi-mode spray gun with something like a multipurpose gadget where I can use my coiled hose with this multimode spray gun to do all tasks like water the plants and also spray pesticides and do all in one activity. And So, I connected my hose to this Double barrelled Self priming 12 v DC pump which is available online actually as a car wash pump. YOU CAN CHECK THIS POST to get all these products used here. I am not promoting this product. You can buy any similar pump and connect according to your plan and requirement and also please suggest more ideas in the comment box so that everyone is benefited.

As you can see, I am spraying this in pressure mist mode on this plant loaded with mealy bugs. See the pressure and with this pressure of fine misting, any pest will definitely dissociate from the plant, even including the underside of the leaves. After washing, you can then spray your regular pesticide.

For me, This is looking perfect so far, with the desired pressure and options to use it as a watering equipment , pest spraying, misting my plants and also misting or watering my seedlings and do a lot of stuff. It really saves me a lot of time.

So, there we have it folks, that was in brief on the best ways to control pests in your garden. Please give me a thumbs up If you liked this post. Also tweet or share the video with your gardener friends. Comment below with any query or any feedback regarding this.

Happy Gardening.