People have been using natural pesticides for many, many years. In the beginning, they used these ways to keep their homes clean of insects, but probably were not able to use the same methods on their crops.
For example, a large number of flies do not like basil or mint, so if you hang that up in your doorway, you will cut down the number of flies in your home, but doing that in a garden is more tricky. The ancients never found a means of dealing with locusts.
Nowadays, rather than repel, we would rather to kill. Not only that though, chemicals that are derivatives of plant life are frequently man-made, because there is more demand for the insecticide than there are plants. Chemical pesticides are more concentrated as well. So, now we have the question, is natural insecticide all that natural?
This question is pretty troublesome to those who worry about polluting the planet with too many chemicals. In fact, there is a mounting number of people who worry about these issues and there has been since the hippy days of the Seventies and even before. Environmentalists worry about the effect mankind is having on our environment by the over use of chemicals, especially, but not only, insecticides.
This is why natural insecticides have seen a resurgence and why so many insecticide manufacturers like to add the words ‘natural’, ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘eco friendly’ to their products’ containers. In fact, many are just climbing onto the eco friendly band wagon.
Look on the box, if there is a word you cannot read or do not understand or is over ten letters long, it is almost certainly a chemical. Which is not to say that it cannot be eco-friendly, but just to remind you that it is not entirely as natural as it may say on the label.
In fact, there are two camps. There are the naturalists who acknowledge that some natural products that are in massive demand, have to be synthesized because there is not enough natural product and there are the purists who shun man-made copies totally. For instance, the latter group would not buy anything that comes in a pressurized can, but they would consider using a mixture of ingredients in a plastic plunger-type spray.
There is a very fine line indeed between say, man-made citronella mosquito deterrent and citronella essential oil that you have extracted from the citronella plant and mixed with alcohol or water and put into your own plunger-type spray. They are basically the same thing, but not quite are they?
At the end of the day, you are the one with your ethics and so the choice is yours. Fortunately, we have a fabulous resource for study at our finger tips, to wit the Internet. If you have principles and you are free-thinking, check out the ingredients of that ‘all natural cockroach killer’ on the Internet, before you part with your money, because there positively are environmentally friendly solutions available and they can be found in the stores, but they are usually on the bottom shelf because they do not produce so much profit.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on many subjects, but is at present involved with Terro Ant Bait. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our web site at Killing Carpenter Ants.