Neem oil review

My Neem Oil Review

In THIS post I mentioned problems I was having with pests on my indoor houseplants. BIG problems. I tried various methods of control to no avail.

Neem oil was one of those methods. I sprayed it onto my plants. It is often recommended online as a means of controlling houseplant pests. I would not suggest it. It seems to have damaged my plant leaves in places.

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I acknowledge that my plants were under serious attack and leaf damage was caused by houseplant pests. Still, I have continued to spray my plants as a precaution so this damage is most certainly from the neem oil.

I do have healthy new growth though.

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Jasmine

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Black Peppercorn.

My peppercorn plant was so damaged at one point I was convinced it was not going to live. It’s doing great!

So why am I down on Neem oil if it does seem to have eradicated the pests? Well it didn’t. I’ve been physically washing the plants off in the sink every time I water them. It makes a big difference. And as you see in this peppercorn picture (kind of) I still have little eggs on my plants, so the neem oil is not repelling them.

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One other plant worth mentioning is one that was a bit of an accident.

Rosemary

This is a rosemary plant I bought around Thanksgiving for cooking purposes. My lovely Daughter keeps yanking the leaves off of my larger plant. In fact it’s a small plant now as she’s lopped the top off. Anyway, so I bought this one from the grocery store and I didn’t think it’d live particularly long. I put it in this mason jar just to collect water as it sits in the kitchen window sill. I’m rather lazy so the jar has filled up with water over time. I was surprised to see the rosemary roots growing down into the water and the plant flourishing under these conditions. Rosemary, from what we’re told, is a dry loving plant. I think I’ll water mine a lot from now on.

Rosemary roots

It’s time to begin gardening inside again.

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Sons dresser is in use again as plant habitat. I dug up 4 pepper plants that I’s started late in the season. Some of them were setting fruit but there was no way they were going to survive the dropping temperatures to ripen. Inside they came. Also inside now is the ginger plant and jasmine plant that had hung out on the back porch all summer. They really enjoyed the summer weather and have grown nicely. Do you like the giant web in that window? We have 2 such spiders in separate windows doing a good job of collecting pests for us. We haven’t bothered them. We like spiders.

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Thai hot pepper anyone?

I am having an issue with the black peppercorn plant still. It has been infested with these little white eggs for some time. I never see a bug, just the eggs. I keep doing stuff to get rid of them but so far, no luck. No real ID on what it is either. I suspect spider mites but I’m not sure.

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I am quitting my day job in December. I have plans to alter our unfinished basement to become my new plant nursery. So stay tuned for that!