Neem oil is an organic pest control remedy that is simple and very effective. Neem oil is pressed out of the seeds obtained from neem trees.

Many gardeners use it for garden pest control of soft bodied insects like aphids, thrips or whitefly. The oil coats the bugs and they suffocate.

Insects would rather die than eat plants treated with neem oil. It disrupts insects’ hormonal balance so they die before they molt to the next life stage. And,

It upsets the insects hormonal system and prevents it from developing to its mature stage.

Neem oil has many complex active ingredients. Rather than being simple poisons, those ingredients are similar to the hormones that insects produce.

Insects take up the neem oil ingredients just like natural hormones.

Neem enters the system and blocks the real hormones from working properly.

Insects “forget” to eat, to mate, or they stop laying eggs. Some forget that they can fly. If eggs are produced they don’t hatch, or the larvae don’t molt.
Obviously insects that are too confused to eat or breed will not survive. The population eventually plummets, and they disappear.

Neem oil makes the plants it touches taste bitter, so pests won’t eat them, as a “contact” insecticide. Insects “forget” to eat after they’ve been in contact with even traces of neem oil.

The greatest benefit of using neem oil is that it doesn’t harm beneficial insects. Butterflies, earthworms, and bees all help plants pollinate or absorb nutrients.

Lacewings eat insects trying to feed on the crops. But these bugs won’t have a negative reaction to neem oil

The main reason is that insects need to ingest the neem oil to be affected, and beneficial insects don’t eat your plants. But you can still kill beneficial insects if you smother them with neem oil, so please be careful.

Beneficial insects are most active during the day. The best time to spray neem insecticide is very early in the morning, so the spray can dry before the good insects become active.

Also a good time is the late afternoon or evening. Once the spray has dried it does not harm your bees, ladybugs, lacewings, predatory mites and wasps etc.

Benefits of neem oil insecticide

• low toxicity, safe for the applicator
• low environmental impact
• organic and biorational
• relatively broad-usage allowed
• easy on beneficial insects and mites

Beside all of the benefits of neem oil the only real downside is that it is not very persistent so may need to be re-applied every few days .

Many gardeners, however, consider this characteristic to actually be another benefit because neem oil insecticide won’t interfere with beneficial insects or delay harvest.

Neem oil kills:

• Garden Snails And Slugs
• Aphids, Armyworms
• Bean Leaf Beetles, Colorado Potato Beetles, Cucumber Beetles, Japanese Beetles
• Moths

• Hornworms, Cabbageworms, Melon worms, Tomato fruit worms

• Ants

• Loopers
• Squash Bugs

• Fruit Fly
• Whiteflies

You can spray vegetables and fruit trees with neem spray right up until the day of harvest. Also, there are no herbs, vegetables or fruit trees that are sensitive to oil sprays.

Soil drenches are designed to get the plant to absorb the neem oil through the roots. There are some vegetables, like onions, cabbages, and tomatoes, that do not like soil drenches with raw neem oil. Spraying, however, is fine.

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Yours truly, Polly – Organic Gardener