The Garden & Household Compendium

There are a lot of nifty tricks out there, so I started collecting them.

These are often hidden behind shitty websites full of ads and a lot of irrelevant text, though, so I figured I’d keep my own tricks in one place. I will be updating this page whenever I find new things I want to document, so feel free to check back later to see if there’s anything new. Here goes the first few things I wanted to note down:

Getting rid of ants and other insects

  • Cinnamon. You would not believe it at first, but the reason the bark of the cinnamon tree is spicy, is because it has evolved it to be (among other things) a natural insect repellant. Put some on/in the holes ants and termites dig open, put it on your plants, put it around your garden, you’ll be surprised how versatile this one is.
  • 90% water + 5% ethanol + 5% soft soap / green soap (do NOT use any detergent or household cleaner, soft soap only!!). Mix well, put in a spray bottle, it’ll kill all the lice on a plant with just a few treatments. I prefer this slightly less than the cinnamon trick, because soft soap isn’t as tasty as cinnamon on edible plants.

Getting rid of weeds

  • Boiling water is surprisingly effective, because it’ll seep down to the roots and kill the entire plant, making sure it won’t return for a while. Some plants are more hardy against this than others, but enough hot water will kill basically anything.

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