Week Ten

Cayenne pepper is often used in foods to give them a spicy flavor and dish soap is normally used to clean dishes and kill bacteria. It makes sense that if dish soap will kill off any harmful bacteria on plates or silverware, that it would also fight of fungi that may be affecting your plants. Also, cayenne pepper has a very strong, spicy taste, which can be enjoyable for humans but I can see why it would deter small insects. It is very interesting that a lot of the products we use in our everyday lives also have applications to gardening. Before this class, I was honestly under the impression that in order to have a well-functioning garden, you had to buy expensive chemicals from the store in order to fight fungi or pests. Clearly, this is not the case as you can save a lot of money by using a lot of the products you already use. I'm interested to see how the homemade pest spray works because I have seen some pests on my plants in the past, not too many, but I'll hopefully be able to notice the difference. I never had too much of a problem with fungi before, so it is difficult for me to attest for the effectiveness of the homemade fungicide. I'm excited to continue to watch my plants grow and I'm hoping I will be able to harvest some of my vegetables in the near future.