5 Super Secrets That’ll Get Cooties to Scoot

The summer’s drought and record heat has done more than dry up lakes and fry up crops. It’s also brought out a whole lot of bugs. So here’s how to battle buzzing bad guys and crafty crawlers the safe and natural way:

Mosquitoes

There’s nothing skeeters hate more than the scent of lemon. So give ‘em a whiff of this fragrant Mosquito Lemon Aid to keep them at bay:

1 cup of lemon-scented ammonia

1 cup of lemon-scented dishwashing liquid

Put these ingredients into your 20 gallon hose-end sprayer, and hose down everything in your yard three times a week, preferably early in the morning or late in the evening.

Ants

Around the yard, ants “farm” sap-sucking insects like aphids so that they can have a steady supply of the honeydew that the little buggers produce. So reach for your trusty hose-end sprayer, and load it with my Lethal Weapon Tonic:

3 tablespoons of garlic and onion juice*

3 tablespoons of skim milk

2 tablespoons of baby shampoo

1 teaspoon of hot sauce

1 gallon of hot water

Mix all of these ingredients in a bucket, and pour the solution into a 20 gallon hose-end sprayer. Then spray your trees every 10 days.

*To make garlic and onion juice, put 2 cloves of garlic, 2 medium onions, and 3 cups of water in a blender, and puree. Strain out the solids.

Fleas

Fido is suffering, so here’s a flea repellent that’ll free him of the annoying hangers-on, lickety-split: Mix a drop or two of oil of eucalyptus into your pet’s shampoo. The eucalyptus odor, which smells good to us, keeps those pesky fleas far, far away.

Ticks

Ticks can make life miserable for both humans and pets. If they’re hanging out in your flowers, shrubs, or ornamental grasses, get rid of ‘em with my Toodle-oo, Tick Spray:

1 tablespoon of Ivory® liquid soap

1 gallon of rainwater or soft tap water

2 cups of rubbing alcohol

Mix the Ivory liquid with the water in a 6 gallon hose-end sprayer jar, then add the alcohol. With the nozzle pressure turned on high, spray your plants from top to bottom—and make sure you get under all the leaves.

Earwigs

These pugnacious pinchers feed at night. During the day, they hide in damp, shady places. To give them their dream home (and their final resting place), loosely roll up several sheets of newspaper, dampen the tube, and set it in a shady spot where hordes of earwigs will crawl inside. As evening approaches, before the critters mosey on out for dinner, unroll the papers over a tub of soapy water.

For more strategies for getting rid of garden thugs, check out my Bug Off! book—FREE for 21 days! It’s filled with swift solutions to put bad bugs, four-legged fiends, and any other garden thugs in their place.