- 6 weeks ago
A dollar box of baking soda may be the simplest organic garden spray you can make, and it can help with two of the most common garden troubles: powdery mildew and soft-bodied pests like aphids. In this practical gardening guide, Elias explains how baking soda helps make leaf surfaces less friendly to fungus such as black spot and rust, while oil and a little mild soap help smother aphids and keep the mix blended. He also gives a plain warning about what this spray can and cannot do, so you know where it works and where other answers are needed.
The recipe is straightforward: water, plain baking soda, a mild cooking oil or neem oil, and a few drops of gentle soap. You also get careful advice on strength, leaf testing, shaking the sprayer as you go, and spraying in the cool hours to avoid harming bees and other helpful insects. For gardeners looking for a low-cost baking soda hack, homemade pest control, natural plant spray ideas, or a simple organic fungicide, this is a clear, old-fashioned kitchen-to-garden method.
Created for viewers searching for organic gardening tips, baking soda spray for plants, aphid control, powdery mildew treatment, black spot on roses, and homemade garden pest spray. It is useful for home gardeners, vegetable growers, and anyone who wants natural garden care, DIY plant treatment, and practical pest and fungus control without reaching first for harsh chemicals.
The recipe is straightforward: water, plain baking soda, a mild cooking oil or neem oil, and a few drops of gentle soap. You also get careful advice on strength, leaf testing, shaking the sprayer as you go, and spraying in the cool hours to avoid harming bees and other helpful insects. For gardeners looking for a low-cost baking soda hack, homemade pest control, natural plant spray ideas, or a simple organic fungicide, this is a clear, old-fashioned kitchen-to-garden method.
Created for viewers searching for organic gardening tips, baking soda spray for plants, aphid control, powdery mildew treatment, black spot on roses, and homemade garden pest spray. It is useful for home gardeners, vegetable growers, and anyone who wants natural garden care, DIY plant treatment, and practical pest and fungus control without reaching first for harsh chemicals.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00You walk out to the garden on a fine morning with your coffee, and your heart sinks.
00:05The squash leaves that were green and broad a few days ago are dusted over with a pale
00:11gray powder, like someone shook flower across them.
00:15The rose Esther tends by the porch has black spots spreading on every leaf, and underneath,
00:22on the soft new growth, those little green aphids are clustered so thick the stem looks alive.
00:31Your first thought is the same one the garden store is counting on.
00:35You need to go buy something.
00:38A bottle of poison with a skull on the label, and a price on the shelf.
00:43Put your wallet away.
00:45Because the most useful thing you can spray on a sick garden is very likely sitting in
00:52your kitchen right now in a box that cost you a dollar.
00:56I am Elias.
00:58My family came over from the Palatinate in 1838, and we have grown our food on this Lancaster
01:05County ground every year since.
01:08And I will tell you plainly, before the garden store sold poison in bottles, folks kept their
01:15plants healthy with simple things from the pantry.
01:19And one of the simplest and best is plain baking soda.
01:24Today I am going to show you how to mix a baking soda spray that knocks back the two
01:30troubles that ruin more gardens than anything else.
01:35But I am also going to be straight with you about what it does and what it does not do,
01:41because a man who promises you one bottle cures everything is the same man selling you the
01:47bottle.
01:49Let me start with the thing you most need to understand, because it is the thing that
01:54makes this spray make sense.
01:56Most of what ruins a garden is not a hundred different enemies.
02:02It is mainly two kinds of trouble.
02:05And this one cheap spray happens to work against both.
02:09The first kind is fungus, that gray powder on the squash and the cucumber leaves.
02:16The folks call it powdery mildew.
02:19The black spots on the rose.
02:22The orange rust on a bean leaf.
02:24Those are not bugs.
02:27They are a kind of mold, a fungus, that takes hold on the leaf and spreads and chokes the
02:34plant slowly.
02:36And here is where the baking soda earns its keep.
02:40Baking soda makes the surface of that leaf just slightly less sour, slightly more sweet
02:47in the chemical sense.
02:49And that small change makes the leaf a poor place for that fungus to grow and spread.
02:56It does not burn the mold off like a poison.
03:00It quietly changes the ground under the fungus so it cannot get a hold.
03:06This is real and well known.
03:09The very same baking soda is even set down in the government's own list as an allowed
03:16natural pest helper.
03:18So this is not a folk notion I am spinning you.
03:22It is plain and it is proven.
03:25The second kind of trouble is the soft little sucking bugs.
03:30The aphids, the mites, the soft-bodied things that cluster on new growth
03:35and drink the life out of your plant.
03:38And those are handled not by the soda, but by the second thing in our mix, the oil.
03:46A fine coat of oil over those soft little bodies simply smothers them.
03:52They breathe through their skin, in a manner of speaking, and the oil closes that off.
03:59So the soda works on the fungus.
04:01The oil works on the soft bugs.
04:05And together in one bottle, they cover the two troubles that account for most of what
04:11you will ever fight in a home garden.
04:14Quick word before I go further.
04:16The old methods my family uses, there is more of it than fits in any one video.
04:22I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
04:29The book is the long version.
04:31If you want it, it is there.
04:33I will not mention it again.
04:36Now let me be honest with you the way I would want a man to be honest with me, because
04:41this
04:42is where these videos usually oversell.
04:45This spray is a fine thing, but it is not a cure for everything that crawls.
04:52It will not do much against a fat caterpillar eating your cabbage, or a beetle, or a borer
04:59tunneling in a squash vine.
05:01Those are bigger, tougher creatures, and they need other answers.
05:06And I will not stand here and tell you one dollar box of soda solves every trouble in
05:13the garden, because it does not.
05:15And you would find me out the first time a caterpillar laughed at it.
05:20What this spray does, it does well.
05:23Fungus on the leaves, and the soft little sucking bugs.
05:26For those two, it is as good as anything you can buy, and costs almost nothing.
05:32Know what a tool is for, and it will not let you down, so let me show you how to
05:37mix it.
05:38It is about as simple as anything in the garden.
05:42You start with water, about a quart, call it a liter, in a spray bottle or a hand sprayer.
05:48Clean water, and if you have rain water caught off the roof, all the better, the way I always
05:54favor.
05:56Into that, two teaspoons of baking soda.
05:59Plain baking soda, mind.
06:01The pure white kind for baking, not baking powder, which is a different thing with other
06:06stuff mixed in, and not the washing soda for laundry, which is stronger and would harm
06:12your leaves.
06:13Just plain baking soda.
06:16If the fungus is bad and well spread, you can go to three teaspoons, but no more, because
06:22too much will burn the very leaves you are trying to save.
06:26Then the oil.
06:27One teaspoon of oil.
06:30Now the source of these things often points you to neem oil, and neem is a fine oil for
06:36this, I will not say otherwise.
06:38But neem is a thing you must go by, and my way has always been to lean first on what
06:44is
06:44already in the house.
06:46So plain vegetable oil from the kitchen, sunflower, soybean, any mild cooking oil, works perfectly
06:54well to smother those soft bugs.
06:57Use the neem if you have it and like it.
06:59Use the plain oil from the pantry if you do not.
07:03Either will do the work.
07:05Now, oil and water do not mix, as you well know, they separate the moment you stop stirring.
07:12So you need one more thing to marry them together, and that is a few drops, about ten drops, of
07:19a mild liquid soap.
07:20A gentle dish soap or hand soap, the plainest kind you can find, nothing with bleach or strong
07:27degreasers in it.
07:29The soap binds the oil into the water so it sprays even, and it helps the whole mix cling
07:35to the leaf instead of running off.
07:38Just a few drops.
07:39This is a place where more is not better.
07:42Stir it or shake it thoroughly until it is milky and even.
07:47And here is the important part.
07:49You must shake it again every little while as you spray, because it will want to separate
07:54on you, and a bottle gone back to plain water on top and oil below will not do the job.
08:01Now, before you go spraying your whole garden, two cautions, and these are the marks of a careful
08:08gardener and the reason folks will trust your results.
08:12The first, do a patch test.
08:14Before you soak an entire prized plant, spray just one leaf or a small corner of the plant,
08:21and then leave it be for an hour or two, and come back and look.
08:25If that leaf is fine, your mix is safe, and you may spray the rest.
08:31If that leaf has wilted or gone scorched, your mix was too strong, and you pour it out and
08:37make a weaker batch with less soda.
08:40Plants differ, and a strength that suits a tough squash leaf might harm a tender one.
08:45Test first, always.
08:48It costs you an hour, and saves you a plant.
08:51The second, and this matters to me, do not make this so strong, and do not spray so carelessly
08:58that you harm the good creatures.
09:01The honey bee and the butterfly, and the little helpful bugs that eat your aphids for you,
09:06those are your friends in the garden, and this spray, made too strong or sprayed right
09:11on a bee can harm them too.
09:14So spray in the cool of the early morning or the evening, when the bees are not working
09:19the blossoms.
09:21Spray the troubled leaves, the tops and the undersides where the bugs hide, and not the
09:26open flowers where the bees come.
09:29Aim at the trouble.
09:30Spare the helpers.
09:32A garden is a whole little world, and you want to mend the one part without harming the
09:37rest.
09:37Do that, and you have a spray that costs pennies, sits in your own kitchen, and handles the
09:44two most common troubles in any garden, as well as the bottled poison does, with nothing
09:49in it you would fear to have around your children or your hens.
09:54Now let me tell you who profits from your believing you needed the bottle.
09:58Not to rile you.
09:59Just so you see the shape of the thing, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
10:04There is no money in a dollar box of baking soda and a spoon of cooking oil.
10:09None.
10:10You already own them both.
10:13But there is a whole shelf at the garden store, a wall of bottles, every one with its own bright
10:19label and its own price.
10:21One for fungus, one for aphids, one for mites, one for this and one for that, as though you
10:28needed a different costly cure for every trouble.
10:31And many of those bottles do, at heart, much the same simple work this one spray does, only
10:38sold to you a problem at a time, season after season.
10:43I am not telling you a man schemed this in a back room.
10:47No one had to.
10:48It is worse than a conspiracy, because it is a system nobody had to coordinate.
10:54It simply pays better to sell a frightened gardener a wall of single trouble bottles than
11:00to teach him that two pantry things in water handle most of it.
11:05The old gardener handled it for pennies because nobody was selling him anything.
11:11So there it is, the whole of it.
11:13A quart of water, two teaspoons of plain baking soda, a teaspoon of plain oil or neem if you
11:20have it, and ten drops of mild soap to bind them.
11:24Shake it well and keep shaking it as you spray.
11:27Test one leaf first.
11:30Spray in the cool hours and spare the bees.
11:33Use it on fungus and on the soft sucking bugs where it shines, and reach for other answers
11:40for the bigger pests where it does not.
11:43Know it for what it is, and it will serve your garden faithfully for almost nothing.
11:50Now I want to hear from you, and I ask honest because I learn the whole country from these comments.
11:56Tell me in the comments below, what is troubling your garden this year?
12:01The mildew, the aphids, the black spot on the roses, or something else?
12:06And tell me your county and what you grow, because the troubles run different from one
12:11part of the country to another, and I like to map it by where you all write from.
12:16I read every one.
12:18And if it is the soil itself you are wanting to set right, not just the leaves, I have another
12:24video where I show you the old tonic we pour on the ground to wake the soil up and feed
12:30the plant from below.
12:32This spray mends the leaf.
12:35That one feeds the root.
12:37Between the two, you have most of what a garden asks of you.
12:41A garden is not a war to be won with a shelf full of poisons.
12:45It is a thing to be tended, gently, with simple things and a careful hand, mending what is
12:52sick and sparing what is good.
12:55My grandmother kept roses by the door her whole life and never bought a bottle to do
13:00it.
13:00And Esther tends those same roses now the same way.
13:05The garden that stays healthy year after year is the garden tended by a hand that knows
13:10the difference between mending and poisoning.
13:14The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting
13:19to remember it.