Emmie's homemade bug repellent #2

Emilya;2890471 said:

Emilya;2875766 said:

Tonight we are going to start making an effective bug repellent from the kitchen. I have problems with tomato worms here in the midwest, and usually fight them with a bit of Neem oil spray. This year, I am going even more natural with a fermented extract of garlic and cayenne pepper, mixed with a fermented extract of ginger. This combination should not only repel the evil green worms, but it will also be a good antibiotic/preventative medicine, and the sulphur in the garlic will be a good fungicide.

Garlic and Ginger are both very hard to get started fermenting, but we can jump start the process by first processing them in beer or wine. I like the idea of using the Boulevard unfiltered beer, because there are still chunks of yeast in there to keep the fermentation process going in the bottle. We are going to use the beer to jump start the fermentation process, and after 24 hours of sitting in the beer, we will add sugar to really get things going.

This is going to take a while, but what harm is a little more shelf space being used for a good purpose?

Ginger and garlic were chopped and formed into equal piles, and then put into my little jars. Beer was added to the top and both bottles were stirred. We are fermenting these two separately because we don't know what the interaction of them would be together. Once they are fermented and stabilized we can combine the two into a very effective dual action foliar spray, but for now, we keep the processes separate.

After we add the sugar tomorrow, things should bubble for about a week. I will take pictures at any stage that things change enough to notice.

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Getting back to the bug repellent experiment, the garlic and the ginger concoctions have been fermenting for about 2 weeks, so today we moved this to the next step.

Today I got bigger containers and added an equal amount of 80% alcohol to the mix to stop the fermentation process. The two concoctions are still separate and we will let them set now for 7-10 days so that all the beneficial elements can be infused into the alcohol.

After 10 days we will drain the liquid from these containers and combine them to make our garlic-ginger extract. We will use this extract at a rate of 1 tablespoon per gallon, so this one project should supply enough spray for me to use all summer in the garden to drive away those evil tomato worms.

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