If you grow vegetables in a garden or outdoor containers, you have probably found little holes chewed in the leaves of your plants or worse, entire branches or vegetables gnawed through by garden pests.
Creator Alicia Tompkins shared her super-easy, all-natural DIY solution to this issue — and all you need are oranges.
As Tompkins demonstrates, this hack doesn't involve pesticides, which add chemical pollution to the air, soil, and water, and can end up killing good bugs as well as pests. Plus, no one wants to ingest chemicals on their home-grown veggies.
There's another variation on this recipe from Sarah Murray, who makes gardening and cooking content as @shecooksorganic on TikTok. Murray shares a recipe passed down to her from her grandfather, who taught her about gardening.
Murray boils orange peels in chunks to create a concentrated orange water that she sprinkles on her plants before putting the orange pieces directly in the soil as well. In her TikTok, she explains that the orange water keeps away aphids, flies, slugs, snails, and ants; and as an added bonus, the oranges contain calcium, magnesium, sulfur, and nitrogen, which help plants flourish.
Organic gardening can be challenging without creepy-crawlies coming to ruin the day. But as anyone who has tasted a tomato right off the vine knows, it's 100% worth the effort.
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