Earlier this year Choice Magazine wrote an article online warning about the hazardous chemicals used in many common household pest control products.
“The downside of keeping your home pest-free is that chemical residues can linger in the air and soil, and on floors, carpets and indoor surfaces, where we can breathe them in or absorb them through the skin. Some chemicals can have immediate and acute poisoning effects, while others can accumulate and remain in our bodies for years, adding to our chemical load every time we give the kitchen surface a spray or the ant nest a dusting.”
Choice found many chemicals labelled as dangerous in Europe are widely used in household insecticides in Australia. It’s a bit of a worry isn’t it?
A Slice of Organic Life is a useful book to have lying around. It’s full of good old-fashioned advice on taking things ‘back-to-basics’, with a foreward by Stephanie Alexander (or Alice Waters in the American edition).
A Slice of Organic Life suggests these natural alternatives to pest control:
Ants
- Stop ants reaching pet food by placing the bowl in a container of water, making a moat that ants cannot cross
- Try crushing and sprinkling pennyroyal, sage, mint, thyme or bay leaves, paprika or cinnamon across ant paths
- Boric acid and corate-based products available at garden centres are effective (a natural product, boric acid is far less toxic than chemical pesticides, but is mildly harmful if injested so please use sparingly)
Clothes Moths
- Store clothes made from natural fibres in airtight bags
- Place sachets of lavender or cedarwood chips among stored clothes
Mosquitoes
- Use a spray bottle filled with ten drops of essential oil (try cedarwood, lemongrass, peppermint, citronella or eucalyptus) and 115mL of water
Fleas
- Herbal flea collar: Mix together 2 teaspoons for pure alcohol, 1 Tablespoon rosemary essential oil, 1 Tablespoon lemon verbena essential oil, 1 Tablespoon lavender oil, 1 Tablespoon pennyroyal essential oil and oil of 4 garlic capsules. Soak an untreated soft felt collar in the mixture, and leave to dry. The effect lasts for one month
Cockroaches
- Dust boric acid into the cracks where cockroaches shelter
- Diatomaceous earth is a dust that scratches the waterproof coat of cockroaches and other crawling insects, causing them to dry out and die
House Flies
- Homemade fly paper: mix together equal parts by volume of sugar, golden syrup and water. Boil the mixture until thick, stirring occasionally. Leave to cool, then dip strips of brown paper parcel wrapping tape into the sticky mixture. Leave to dry outside for about 30 minutes. Hang up with string. The files will be attracted to the sticky coating
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Earlier this year Choice Magazine wrote an article online warning about the hazardous chemicals used in many common household pest control products.
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