As soon as I closed the season, I immediately began to miss my favorite cottage. To dispel the sadness and melancholy and satisfy the cottage hunger, I began to plan the planting of the next season, buy seeds, prepare seedling pots-cups, and at the same time reflect on chronic gardening problems. I remembered how, at the end of the summer, a friend had told me about the miraculous properties of orange peels, which help her get a good harvest of cabbage and carrots without using chemicals,and I looked at the orange fruits that were on the table.
Solar oranges regularly appear in our house during the autumn and winter period, and during these months I manage to send a huge mountain of peel to the trash. Maybe we should adopt the special properties of these aromatic wastes and try them out next year.
Curiosity got the better of me, and I began to surf the Internet, read stories of summer residents on forums, and collect information about the use of orange peels in the garden and garden. And in order not to lose your orange discoveries before the new season, I made out all the tips and tricks in a separate article. Dear seven-year-olds, look what I did. Maybe together we will start collecting and drying orange peel, and next summer we will conduct a large citrus experiment in the cottage?
“Chip” of orange peel
As it turned out, orange zest owes its pronounced flavor to lemonene — a special compound contained in its essential oils. This substance is valuable in gardening, not only because of its aroma, but also because of its toxic properties against insects. Some of them, because of the persistent orange smell, are disoriented in space and can not find the delicious plant, while others are poisoned by lemonene and quickly die.
In addition, orange peels, which are abundant in potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and other valuable elements, are used by some summer residents as a top dressing, while other savvy comrades use zest to facilitate their cottage life and save on buying expensive store-bought drugs. But about everything in order.
1. Aphid
To rid garden and garden crops of colonies of this insect, add 1 Cup of dry crushed orange crusts to 10 liters of water and insist 4-5 days. Filtered infusion sprayed affected plants every 3-4 days. Experienced people claim that aphids will completely disappear after 2-3 such treatments.
2. Ants
Orange peel promises to drive away the first friends of aphids-ants. For this purpose, you need to soak a handful of dry crusts in warm water, break the swollen zest into a mush with a blender and spread it at the bases of berry bushes and tree trunks — ants will no longer walk on the branches of these plants. If the pests have set up their camp on a garden bed, the top of the anthill is dug out and simply spread on top of this orange mush. The recipe is quite simple, with a minimum of manipulation and ingredients. I have on the site just there are several unkillable ant heaps that I have been fighting for years, they are suitable for conducting an experiment.
3. Trips council
Here’s another recipe. It turns out that the infusion prepared to fight aphids helps out in another matter — it helps to repel the attack of thrips. They say that after the first treatment, these insects begin to massively fold their heads, and after the third-completely disappear. I’ve never had thrips, so I’ll have to take your word for it.
4. Spider mite
You can quickly defeat a tiny, but extremely harmful spider mite using an infusion that is prepared from 2 cups of dry orange zest, 200-300 g of fresh crushed wormwood grass and 10 liters of water. The contents are infused for 4-5 days and after straining, they are used for spraying every 5-7 days. I heard about wormwood from a spider mite, but this is the first recipe I met. I added it to my experimental piggy Bank.
5. Cabbage butterfly
This is a recipe from the same friend who prompted me to do the orange investigation. To fight cabbage butterflies, she adds 1 Cup of dry orange peel to 10 liters of water, leaves it for 3-4 days, and then sprays the cabbage with a strained infusion to prevent insects from laying eggs on the leaves. This procedure is carried out by a friend of mine every week throughout the season and does not find a single caterpillar on the plants.
6. Carrot fly
According to the same familiar summer resident, the carrot fly does not tolerate the smell of oranges. To scare off the pest from the garden, in the spring it makes a dry orange peel for digging. This is both power and protection-two in one. It combines this technique with special watering. Starting in may, every 7-10 days, a friend waters carrots from a watering can with a 2-3-day orange infusion (2-3 handfuls of dry crusts per 10 liters of water). Since this pest can give up to 3 generations per season, this procedure was carried out by a friend until the harvest. He says there are no flies in the beds. How do you like this set of procedures?
7. Wireworm
In the filing of old cottage magazines, I found another trick that was broadcast to the world by an Amateur gardener. He advised fellow cottagers who could not get a decent harvest of potatoes, carrots and beets because of the machinations of the larvae of the Nutcracker beetle, to gather more orange peel in the winter. Dry crusts should be added by handfuls to each hole when planting potatoes and sealed in the soil when preparing beds for root crops – the wireworm does not touch vegetables that smell like orange.
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