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Re: Bugs on Peppers, pepper spray recipe, and larvae in peppers

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

Mike,

You could actually try making a pepper spray. Buy a fresh hot pepper
from the supermarket, if you have one ready in the garden, put it in a
blender or a food processor with about a cup of water and whir it to a
puree. Let the solids settle to the bottom and then use the clear pepper
"broth" in a mister and go out and squirt your plants. This seems to
ward off all sorts of buggies. Make sure you're very careful to wash
your hands and be downwind when you are misting the plants. The pepper
spray will sting your eyes, it hurts (the voice of experience)!

I try to grow organically and occasionally find a few bugs in odd
places. Last year I found a few larvae that were living inside my
hottest peppers, I don't know what type of butterfly or moth they would
have turned into if I had not interrupted their metamorphosis. I think
that this is a very fascinating self-preservation method. By eating the
hot pepper the larvae ingests the capsicum and morphs into a butterfly
with the hot pepper's own heat as part of its  "flavor".  Any bird,
animal, or bug that would try to eat the butterfly would get a mouthful
of the burning hot pepper taste and promptly spit out the bug. The bug
itself might not survive the initial chomp but the predator will
remember the experience and not eat any identical or even similar
butterflies in the future. Hot stuff!

Trudi


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