Neem Oil & Essential Oil Bug Spray For Your Cut Flower Garden

We’re big fans of neem oil, as a bug spray, around here.  If you’ve ever found a dahlia chewed through by an earwig or had your zinnias crumple into a powdery mildew mess come August, you know the benefit of having a good defense against bugs and disease.

Why neem oil?  Neem oil is a natural product derived, unsurprisingly, from the neem tree.  We don’t like the thought of smothering our flowers in harsh chemicals, so we’ve settled on using a homemade neem oil and essential oil mix to help prevent disease and bugs from taking down the garden.  I mean, we’re not working this hard to feed the bugs, right?

There’s a lot of information on the internet about how a neem oil bug spray works as both an insecticide and a fungicide.  I won’t get into it here but here is a good article to read if your new to neem oil.  Basically the oil tastes bad to bugs, and it also can smother them if it lands on them.  It also coats the leaves in a waxy substance that helps to protect the plant from diseases like powdery mildew and rust.

Here’s our recipe and instructions for making our neem oil bug spray.  If you’re looking for the neem oil and essential oils we use, you can click the links and find them on Amazon.  These are affiliate links and we do make a small commission on them if you make a purchase.  It’s no extra cost to you and it helps to keep the electricity on around here. 🙂

Neem Oil & Essential Oil Bug Spray:

We use a two-gallon sprayer, so the amounts I’ve listed below are for two gallons of spray.

1 Tablespoon Dawn dish soap

4 Tablespoons Neem oil (or according to package instructions)

20-40 drops each of the following essential oils:

Rosemary, peppermint, cedarwood, thyme, pine, tea tree*

Instructions:

Pour about a quart of very warm water into your sprayer.  Add the dish soap and give it a couple of hearty swishes to make sure the soap and water are well mixed.  Next, add the neem oil and mix again so that there’s no neem oil sitting on the surface of the water.  Add the essential oils and mix again.  All this mixing before you add cold water is important since you don’t want the oils and water to separate.  Fill with cold water so that the liquid ends up being somewhere near room temperature.  This doesn’t have a great shelf life, so I only mix up what I will use up in an evening.

We use this 2 gallon sprayer.

*NOTE:  The strength of essential oils varies so much.  Always check with the supplier and dilute according to their instructions.

The first line of defense is having healthy soil that creates healthy flowers, and for that we us compost and organic fertilizers.  Still, bugs and disease occasionally plague us so we regularly reach for our neem oil bug spray.

If you’re looking for a few more tips on keeping flowers happy in the garden, here’s a post from a few years back.

And if you want to hear me jabber on about this same topic a bit longer, here’s a video.

Have any insect or disease fighting tricks up your sleeves?  I’d love to hear them.  One can never be too well armed when it comes to fighting garden pests.  Ha!

Happy bug hunting,

Rosita