Hi. I’m Amy Stewart with project wellness. In this segment, I’m going to give you a great option for taking care of your plants should they get bugs or pest problems. Very often, herbs have built in pesticides so you really don’t need to use a pesticide or anything like that on it unless your herbs have a problem, which as I said, they very rarely do. A lot of times, people will use herbs in their gardens around other plants when they’re doing a vegetable garden because herbs really are fantastic with their natural resistance. However, in the event that you end up with a problem, you’re going to want to use something that you would eat basically which is not going to be 100% no matter what you choose.

So, there are lots of different preparations that you could use. The only one that I have found that I will use that comes from a commercial farm store, home store or whatever and you cannot always find it is the brand called Safer. And you basically just buy a concentrate and this much will make gallons and gallons and gallons of pesticide. And as I said, you’re not going to want to use it unless you end up with a problem. You can read—let’s get this open so you can see. All pesticides that are commercially available have product information just like pharmaceuticals do. That will tell you what is in them and what to use them for. Indications of course also if you end up with some in your eyes or something like that.

Now, this is definitely by far safer than most of the other stuff that you’ll find but you may also want to do some additional research if you are terribly sensitive. So, here is what we’re going to do. Since this is a concentrate, we do need to make sure that we get the right ratio and I’ve already put water into a spray bottle. This, you can of course find at a farm store, home store or wherever. And I have a handy dandy tablespoon measure. And for this particular mixture, I want to just simply use one tablespoon to my 24 ounces of water.

So there you are. As you can see, we haven’t used very much. We’ll go ahead and get that mixed up nicely. One other thing about insecticide also which is what this is called, again, that is the stuff, is you’re going to want to use it relatively soon after you make it. So this is not something that you’re going to want to make and then keep it around all summer. You will want to just make sure that you get rid of it in a safe way. So now that you’ve got your pesticides already mixed however, if you did have bugs or pests that were bugging your herbs, you could of course spray them gently with your spray bottle. That’s all ready to go. And that’s what to do in the unlikely event that your herbs get bugs or pests.