If you garden, you’ve probably lost some crop to insects. If you don’t garden but have some seeds among your preps, you *will* lose crop to insects once you plant those seeds. Best be well prepared, you’ll lose most or all of the crop.
Gardens always have insects. Soon or late, some species of insect is going have a population explosion. Then they can trash your whole planting. That’s frustrating, during good times. That’s disaster during hard times. Best to get ready to defend now, yes?
Why not just use chemical insecticides?
Hey wait, who said you shouldn’t? Our garden is normally kept organic, but we do have some Sevin (carbaryl) among our preps in case of emergency. Permethrins and malathions are also popular choices. The University of Kentucky offers a nice downloadable summary on popular commercial insectides here.
There are also organic insecticides for sale. Bacillus thuringiensus and neem oil deter insects very well, for example. One could stock up some of these. I haven’t. I do use neem oil, but the little information available indicates its shelf life is only a year or two.
Which is the problem with this plan in general. Preppers are probably thinking about big gardens, and maybe over multiple years. This post, then, focuses on solutions that are likely to be sustainable without commercial support.
Organic and sustainable methods of insect control
The methods discussed here are organic not as an ethical statement, but because they’ll stay available. They come from a variety of sources, both literature and experience. A reader survey from Mother Earth News was particularly helpful.
Physical methods
For some bugs, pulling off individual insects and dumping them in a pail of soapy water is actually pretty effective. You have to catch them early while they’re not very abundant. Obviously, this works for the bigger species like squash bugs but not for little insects that come by the billions such as aphids. It is time consuming work and hard on the back.
Row covers are much less labor intensive. Floating row covers are light, air and somewhat light-permeable strips of material. You put them over the plants to physically block the insects. If put on at night, they deter rabbits too. They’re good at keeping out flying insects. Caveat: You can’t have row covers on during flowering for species that need flying insect pollinators. Of course.
Row covers are light enough to not crush the plants, tight enough to bar flying insects.
Note: Any links and brands are just to give you a starting point for investigation. We have no financial interest or arrangements with any of these sellers.
Hanging up birdhouses that don’t have bottoms will seem pointless to the birds. Paper wasps like to nest in them. Paper wasps parasitize some of the catepillars that are the worst insect pests. Such wasps persecute cabbage worms in particular. (If you raise anything like broccoli or cabbage, you learn to hate those white butterflies that come from cabbage worms.) On a happy note, paper wasps are not total jerks to people as many wasps are.
Companion plantings
I’ll get more detailed in a later post, but the idea here is to plant some species in the garden that benefit other species. Some insects avoid being in the neighborhood of particular plants. Nasturtium, marigolds, sweet allysum, and borage are favorites. I won’t say these *protected* my squash from squash bugs last year, but I did plant the flowers and I did get fewer bugs.
They’re lovely in their own right. It’s a bonus that sweet allysum also deters some insects.
Four o’clocks are very pretty flowers. Japanese beetles, a voracious pest insect, love them too. Too bad for the Japanese beetles that the 4 o’clocks are poisons to them! (Insert vindictive laugh here.)
Four o’clocks are lovely. They also kill Japanese beetles.
The problem with invasive species like the Japanese beetle is that they don’t have native predators. The good news is that they aren’t defended against the four o’clock toxin.*
Onions and garlic repel some pests too. These don’t get compact rows in my garden. I plant them interspersed among other species. I put in plenty too. They’re good food and store well without refrigeration.
Spraying insects after they arrive
Not all insecticide sprays come from the AgroChemical Complex. There are many recipes for sprays out there to deter insects that you make at home from easily available materials. Here’s one pretty typical recipe:
Bring to a boil 4 cups water, ½ onion (sliced thin), 2 garlic cloves (mashed or chopped), ¼ tsp cayenne. Add ¼ of a bar of soap, grated. Stir. Remove from heat when bubbles start to rise, about 2 min. Cover and let it sit 20 min. Strain and use.
The best way to use these is a sprayer bottle for small applications. To cover more area, tank sprayers you pressurize by pumping air in are cheap to buy and easy to use. (Pro tip: Get one with a wand long enough you don’t have to bend over to spray the low plants. You’re welcome, backs.)
The tank I use looks a lot like this: Handle on top to pump air in, hose and spray wand.
Tips on using sprays
Some recipes add mint or peppermint essential oil. Chopped hot pepper can sub for cayenne. Often they substitute liquid soaps. Soaps can be homemade, but dish detergent works well. The soap is really helpful in getting the spray to stick to the leaves. Many plants wax their leaves to shed water and deter fungi; that also sheds unsoaped spray.
I’ve tried a similar version of spray. I learned a couple of significant points: 1) Deer like their apple blossoms spicy. Insects didn’t get my apple trees that year, but the deer did. 2) More is not better. Upping the pepper to dissuade the deer burned the plant leaves.
No insect defense is perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. If you keep the numbers down, you get to keep your crop. That is, if you protect against other hazards like bad soil, frost, and larger predators. (More on predator defense here.) Nobody said gardening was easy. That’s why you need to learn now!
** Recipe for spray from the Backyard Garden Lover: https://www.backyardgardenlover.com/how-to-get-rid-of-japanese-beetles/?fbclid=IwAR2bUvUVh7dNv-O-EYhMs7gbZp-alhKKfJkesRdK1iiW9x1OY_JQNXw38-Y
*Thanks for the image to Melissa McMasters from Memphis, TN, United States [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
Ultrafine spray oil, a highly refined mineral oil, is a great non burning year round spray for aphids, mites, lacewings, etc…probably not pesky shield bugs, though. Dusting sulfur is effective against fungal and bacterial disease, also mites. I use a product called Bioform as a cool season (night temps below 55F) fertilizer and clean up spray for plants in the rose family, it has sulfured molasses, very helpful, probably could just use diluted sulfured molasses.
Insecticidal soaps are effective, could probably experiment with diluted lye water and make your own post SHTF.
Put 6 habanero peppers, 2 cups of water, and a tablespoon of vegetable in a blender, puree, then strain the mixture through cheesecloth into a gallon of water, add a teaspoon of dish soap. This is a highly effective general purpose insecticide, but cannot be used on plants in the rose family as it burns them badly. Best miticide ever, though.
Corn earworms are a big worry post SHTF, Bt powder is very effective but has a two year shelf life. Arsenic has a long shelf life but would hate to dust my tassels with it. I let the fire ants live in my garden because they are carnivorous and I have seen them get after corn earworms, going inside the developing ears to eat the worms. Once we’re all hungry, though, ear worms and weevils are just more protein…
Thanks Judge; I’ll have to try some of these. My family used sulfur to keep off ticks; should have thought of it discouraging mites. The lye soap worries me a bit though; it’s bound to have a pretty basic pH I’d think.
Lacewings are beneficial insects as their larvae eat aphids.