Thursday, April 26, 2007

Botanical Insecticide

Today, I will describe how I prepared botanical pesticide for crawling worms and larvae that attack our crops especially cabbage and brocolli. The most destructive of these worms are cabbage butterflies, diamondback moths, leafminers and inchworms.

The botanical insecticide was prepared using half drum of water, wild sunflower (Tithanium diversifoleum) shoots, kakawate (Madre de cacao) leaves and cigarette butts. One sack of sunflower shoots and kakawate leaves were gathered. The sack was tied up so the leaves would not come out of the sack. Then the sack was immersed in the drum filled with one half drum of water. Also immersed in the water were some 100 cigarette butts gathered from smokers who included our farmer partners. A heavy stone was placed on top of the sack to prevent it from floating, after which, the drum was covered.

The plants were left to rot for two weeks. The drum was opened and the water with the decomposed decoction was allowed to pass through a screen and sieve to remove the substrates and decomposed leaf tissues. A fine mesh cloth was used to finally filter the water. One liter of this solution was mixed with 15 liters of water . This was used to spray against the worms and larva attacking the cabbages and brocolli.

The effect shows that after a few minutes, the larvae and caterpillar drop off the plants and die. The sunflower and kakawate leaves have properties that kill off the worms. The effect of both leaves is made more potent by the tar and nicotine extracts from the cigarette butts.

This is our effective, simple and inexpensive control for worms and larvae. Our warning though, the only disadavantage is that the decoction smells and the applicator should cover all his body and face to prevent the smell from sticking to his skin. But the extract is safe when in contact with the skin.
Next Time: TopDressing Fertilizer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really think that your study or so what called Experiment is very interesting and wonderful, for you come up with an idea that will benefit humankind in such a way of providing them needed information for the people to use.

Unknown said...

What is the shelf life of the final product? What is the alternative for cigarrette butts?