And, neem oil is not even close to Arber Bio Insecticide, y’all.

One of the most heart-wrenching lessons I learned as a gardener is that your plants can go from lush and bountiful to depleted and unproductive virtually overnight by introducing the wrong products. 

Let me set the scene.

The sun was coming up over the horizon and gently kissed my face to wake me up. I rose out of bed with a pep in my step. The first thing I wanted to do was head out to the garden. I was so excited to catch my okra plants blooming before work because they were usually faded or closed by the time I got home.

One grow bag of okra plants was perfect. The other one was staggering. The buds on my okra plants in the second grow bag were COVERED in black and white specks. I wasn’t sure what to do because, before that morning, I hadn’t been visited by any garden pests. But, I didn’t have a good feeling. 

I snapped a pic to text to my plant friends. My instinct was right– I’d just been foisted into my first garden war with aphids, and I’d already lost the first battle. (I should have companion planted herbs to help deter them in the first place.) But they told me not to worry. All I had to do was pick up some neem oil to take care of this aphid infestation quick, fast, and in a hurry.

WRONG. Introducing neem oil to my garden was a HUGE mistake. 

What is Neem Oil?

Neem oil is a naturally occurring pesticide and fungicide extracted from the seeds of the neem tree, which is why it’s so beloved by organic gardeners and gardeners who want to roll back on pesticides they think are harmful or dangerous in their gardens. Top-quality neem oil is yellow-brown, has a thick consistency, and has a pungent odor. You can either buy cold-pressed neem oil and mix your sprayable solution or get a pre-mixed solution containing hydrophobic neem extracts from various garden supply companies.

Neem oil has been catapulted to holy grail status in recent years. Still, it is a polarizing product. On one side, some gardeners swear by it. These are well-intentioned gardeners who think they’ve found the one product that can do it all without harming themselves or the environment. On the other: gardeners who don’t understand why or believe it deserves its cult-like following. I fall firmly into the latter camp– I’ll never reach for it again and always choose Arber Bio Insecticide for my pest control needs instead.

Bio Insecticide targets bad bugs

As a pesticide, cold-pressed neem oil works in 2 ways– by suffocating insects on contact and by disrupting an insect’s ability to feed and reproduce when ingested due to a compound called Azadirachtin. My problem with neem oil isn’t that it doesn’t work; my problem is that it works indiscriminately. Even if I treated my garden first thing in the more before pollinators start moving around, the smallest drop of neem oil on a flower in the morning is enough to harm our vital pollinators because the Azadirachtin can live on the pollen or petals until the solution dries or is degraded by direct sunlight. 

Moreover, high populations of pests will attract whatever eats them. For aphids, that’s ladybugs and assassin bugs. Neem oil can suffocate beneficial insects, too. And if they manage to survive being covered in neem oil, they are unlikely to make more pest-fighting babies. 

After I treated my garden with a neem oil solution, my harvests significantly decreased until I resorted to hand-pollination. I also noticed that after I treated my garden, the aphids kept returning so I had to keep spraying the neem oil solution. Why? Because there were no good bugs in my garden– none to pollinate or control pests.

The Lesson: If an infestation has gotten to the point where it requires intervention, it will always be better to choose a product that doesn’t sacrifice good bugs that have shown up to help you in the process. Arber Bio Insecticide directly targets pests because it works systemically. It’s comprised of Burkholderia, a naturally occurring bacterium that’s quickly absorbed through the leaves and roots so that insects are only controlled once they nibble into the plant.  This year when aphids showed up on my okra plants, I was comforted in knowing that treating my plants wouldn’t harm the League of Assassin bugs on patrol.

Bio Insecticide is light & heat-tolerant

My second qualm with cold-pressed neem oil is that it’s unreliable. Neem oil is, in fact, an oil. It must be diluted with water and an emulsifier to make a sprayable solution. (If not properly diluted, it will burn and suffocate your plants– trust me, I know.) What recommenders of neem oil don’t tell you is that when mixed with water, Azadirachtin starts to degrade. Even more, Azadirachtin further degrades with exposed to sunlight. If you’re mixing a solution, cold-pressed neem oil has to be stored in a dark bottle away in a cabinet, and your solution must be used within 8 hours. Additionally, Azadirachtin continues to break down when it’s used as a foliar spray outdoors, so you can’t guarantee how much of the active ingredient has made it to your garden or determine how long it will work. The pungent smell of cold-pressed neem oil could act as a deterrent, but even that dissipates rather quickly. It would require very frequent use to be effective, coating my plants almost every few days.

Let’s say you would prefer to skip the mess and buy a ready-made solution from the store. You’ll find that commercial sprays tend to swap cold-pressed neem oil for clarified hydrophobic neem oil, which doesn’t contain Azadirachtin but still claims to yield the same results as cold-pressed neem oil. However, if you look at the fine print on the bottle, it advises that neem oil (or any other horticultural oils) should NOT be used in conditions warmer than 85°F.

For me, pest pressure is highest during the summer months– homemade or commercial neem oil solutions can’t help me when outdoor temperatures can climb into the triple digits.

In other words, I burned my okra plants for no reason.

The Lesson: Arber Bio Insecticide is NOT oil-based, so I won’t risk burning or suffocating my plants. Additionally, when the concentrate is diluted in water, I have a full 24 hours to use the solution. Finally, when used as a preventative, I only have to spray my garden every 2 weeks. But the most important benefit to using Bio Insecticide rather than neem oil is that it remains consistently effective through my Louisiana summers when I need it the most!

Bio Insecticide helps plants recover

One last thing that I think most gardeners don’t often consider when they enter a war against garden pests is that stressed plants attract pests. When plants are in duress due to over/under watering (my okra plants were struggling with inconsistent watering), environmental stressors, disease, overfertilization, and even pests, they send out a pheromone that calls in more pests to consume them. Think of those pheromones like a “swan song”.

Let’s say you win the war against pests in your garden with neem oil– your plant is still left severely compromised and will continue sending out pest-attracting pheromones until it recovers. Neem oil may have taken care of the pests, but your plant isn’t better off for having used it; it doesn’t help your plant heal. This is why my infested okra plants never fully recovered and produced at the same rate as the other okra plants that I didn’t treat with the neem oil solution. 

The lesson: Burkholderia, the active ingredient in Bio Insecticide, not only induces systemic resistance to future infestations, it also enhances plant’s natural defense mechanisms AND promotes growth.

The Harvest

Be careful of anything that’s touted as a miracle “catch-all.” If you get in the habit of grabbing neem oil at the first sight of something off– every unfamiliar bug or spot on a leaf– you miss the opportunity to learn more about what’s going on in your garden and, more importantly, why. You don’t need to be a gardening expert, but you should strive to be an expert in your garden.

Before going into battle with these pests every time they attempt a hostile takeover, remember 2 things: 

• Your garden is a part of a delicate ecosystem. Don’t approach pest control with a “scorched earth” mentality. Be mindful of the environment to which your garden is connected. Always look for practices and products that appreciate the relationship between your garden and its environment and work with it like Arber Bio Insecticide, not against it.
• The best defense is a good offense. Prevention will always be better for your sanity and your garden. Adopting a plant wellness regimen, like Arber Biological Concentrate Trio, will keep your plants at their healthiest and more resilient against whatever comes their way. Don’t wait until something big like a full-blown infestation happens to react because you’ll be more likely to initiate nuclear protocols (re: harmful pesticides) in your garden.