if you are one of the growing number of people worldwide that thinks that we should start using fewer chemicals on our planet, then you have probably wondered about home-made pesticides. Once you have had a lung full of ant spray or cockroach spray, you know that it would be a good idea if you could use something less ghastly.

The problem is that we have come to depend on a spray of this to destroy ants, a spray of that to kill cockroaches and another spray for silverfish or whatever. This is all a big con. You do not need three or four sprays to kill or deter all the insects that you are concerned about.

In fact, many sprays contain the old-fashioned pesticides, but they are packaged so as to make you pay a lot more for them.

Boric acid can be used to kill all insects that have mandibles and scavenge. If you want to eradicate ants, mix it with water and sugar. It will be taken back to the nest, if you do not make the mixture so strong that it kills the ants before they can get home. Boric acid will also poison cockroaches. Mix it with flour or pour it in liquid form on bread.

You can kill greenfly or aphids quite effortlessly, by spraying them with your used washing-up water. Soapy water is all you require to kill these insects.

The Colorado potato beetle is a pest in some countries. You can kill or discourage the Colorado potato beetle with a spray made from soaking cedar wood chips in water. This will make a tea-coloured fluid. It is a powerful pesticide and an antibiotic too. Spray it onto the foliage.

You can also use a foliage spray made from tansy. The method is to dry the tansy and then grind it up – as finely as you can be bothered to. Use a pestle and mortar and then mix it with water. The finer you ground the tansy, the fewer blockages you will suffer in your spray gun.

Cutworms can be defeated by mixing pineapple weed with water and spraying on affected areas. Sagebrush and water will have the same effect, but you may need to boil the mixture to extract the essential oils.. If you do not have these plants where you live, you can mix molasses with bran or sawdust and spread that on your plants just before dusk.

The tomato hornworm causes a great deal of damage to tomatoes where they exist. This technique of destroying them is not a pesticide as such, but it is very effective. Spread cornflour around your tomato plants, the hornworms will feed on this too, but they cannot digest it. It will soak up their digestive fluids , expand, and blow them up. This technique can be used on cockroaches too.

A spoonful of canola oil and a drop or two washing-up liquid in a spray gun will exterminate most soft bodied grubs

Diatomaceous earth is a good barrier to all insects and is one of the few ways of clearing out bed bugs too.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on many topics, but is currently involved with Terro Ant Killer. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Killing Carpenter Ants.

There are over 1,000 species of carpenter ants. Most of them are large, between a quarter of an inch and an inch long, and black, although there are red ones too. There are even a few species in South East Asia which will explode if threatened, ejecting a sticky substance out through their heads which immobilizes the attackers. The exploding carpenter ant dies.

Carpenter ants are thought to do a lot of damage to timber, as they gnaw their way up the middle through its length. However, this is a popular myth, unlike termites, carpenters do not eat wood, they chew their way through it to get somewhere. They spit the gnawed wood out. This is called frass and it can often be seen in heaps like sawdust. It is a good sign that carpenters are active in or around your home.

Carpenter ants like to travel through the length of damp or rotten dead timber in much the same manner as termites do although they do not consume the timber. Carpenters feed on dead insects, dead animals and honeydew from aphids and scale insects outside the home, but if they come inside your home they will be looking for dropped or uncovered food, especially anything sweet and sugary. Therefore, hygiene is an important factor in clearing carpenters out of your home.

These ants will walk up to a hundred yards while looking for food, but they like to be close a recurring supply of food. A characteristic of carpenter ant colonies is that they may construct satellite nests away from their main colony. This is often why they go into a home.

If they regularly find spilled food in the kitchen, they may make a nest in the wall to take advantage of it, particularly if the window or door frame is a bit decayed. Inside the home, they will probably nest in a cavity wall, outside the home they prefer to construct nests in decaying tree stumps.

It is no good spraying carpenter ants with insecticide if you want to get rid of them – especially if you kill large numbers of them. This may sound odd, but the reason is that the nest will miss these workers and so the queen will increase her production of eggs to counteract it. If she over compensates, you are in a worse situation that you were before spraying.

The only way to destroy a nest of carpenter ants is to destroy the queen and the entire colony with poison. This is not difficult although it does take a bit of investigative work. Carpenters are most active between dusk and midnight, so put out honey on glass or sticky tape where they are active and follow them when they take it home.

Do not forget, they may have several nests in their colony. If you have to have light, wrap red cellophane over a normal torch, because ants can not see red light. When you have found their nests, put poison down outside each nest as indicated on the label. Do this for several days in a row until you do not see anymore carpenter ants. If you are still getting them, you have missed a nest.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on many subjects, but is at present concerned with Getting Rid Of Carpenter Ants. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Killing Carpenter Ants.

People have been using natural pesticides for thousands of years. In the beginning, they used these methods to keep their residences clean of insects, but perhaps 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.

These days, rather than repel, we would rather to kill. Not only that though, chemicals that are derived from plants 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 issue, is natural insecticide all that natural?

This question is quite troublesome to those who worry about polluting the planet with too many chemicals. In fact, there is a growing number of people who worry about these problems and there has been since the hippy days of the Seventies and even before. Environmentalists are anxious about the effect mankind is having on our surroundings by the over use of chemicals, particularly, but not only, insecticides.

This is why natural pesticides have seen a resurrection and why so many pesticide manufacturers love to add the words ‘natural’, ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘eco friendly’ to their products’ labels. In fact, many are just jumping onto the eco friendly band wagon.

Look on the label, 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 completely as natural as it may say on the box.

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, synthesized citronella mosquito repellent 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 principles and so the choice is yours. Luckily, we have a fabulous resource for study at our finger tips, namely the Internet. If you have values 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 shops, but they are normally on the bottom shelf because they do not produce so much profit.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on many topics, but is currently concerned with Terro Ant Bait. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please visit our web site at Killing Carpenter Ants.