Homemade Bug Spray

Officially it’s not allowed to make your own treatments for bugs and problems on your allotment. 

(So I’m not advocating that anyone tries this on their plants.)

Black Fly on the Broad Beans

We’ve had a problem with our beautiful broad beans. 

  
They’ve got black fly!

Oh no!

Now insecticide is out of the question. We keep bees. Insecticide is terrible. 

So from our bee keeping we’ve learned that bugs don’t like thyme. We took some home grown dried thyme and ground it into a fine powder. 

Then we put it a pan with hot water to make a ‘tea’. We added a squirt of washing up liquid.

 
Now we also know that ants don’t like cinnamon. The ants farm the black fly. They carry them onto the plant. So we added cinnamon oil to the cooled liquid. 

Then we filtered it through kitchen paper in a sieve. 

   
 

The washing up liquid helps it stick to the plant. 

Then we sprayed it onto the bugs. 

The next time we went it was much improved.