I believe that I heard a prominent gardener say that molasses was a natural pesticide, but it was thinned and may have had something else added to it. In my spare moments today, I will see if I saved that video.
Here is why I am fantastic - this morning, I surveyed the plants on the deck and in the greenhouse and in two wood long planters sitting on the ground in the actual garden part, and the net room on the actual garden part.
Every plant out there I started with seed except the three prepackaged buckets of potatoes I got at Walmart, and the lettuce strip and the onion bulbs and Egyptian Walking Onions, three blackberry stalks, and strawberries. I can absolutely make seeds grow fast as long as I have Espoma seed starter. I bought four big bags of that so I'm not running out of that for a long time.
Here is what I saw this morning:
Egyptian Onions are strong looking and I don't think it will be long before they start doing their thing to grow new onions on the stalks growing up. The stalks will fall over with the weight of the new onions and those new onions will grow roots and start the process all over, thereby they are “walking”.
Lettuce strip in long wood planter - I see tiny green lettuce coming up.
Net room - Now, this amazes me. There are at least 30 onion bulbs in grow bags and they shot up inches last night. Anywhere from one and a half to two inches taller than they were yesterday. Don't know how that is possible, but it happened.
Deck plants - There is a bucket with a green, solid stalk that died back and now it is growing a limb on each side of the maybe 2 inch plus stalk. It is a Mortgage Lifter tomato that died back due to the cold. I have new ML seeds under the grow lamp but this killed back one may recover since it has new growth on both sides.
Every plant on that deck looks great - the Deck Corn grown from seed is taller every day, about 4-5 inches tall now.
There are healthy peppers of all types and three kinds of container bush peas and celery and three blackberry stalks growing healthy limbs and leaves, and cucumbers and three types of bunching onions, and 40 or so blooming strawberry plants. There are containers of Johnny's tobacco, healthy and growing. The one Tromboncino squash is at least four inches tall and looks great.
Four types of tomatoes are okay but the cold didn't help them one bit. I have more types of tomato seed under the grow lamp.
There are numerous healthy, growing plants in the greenhouse that must be transplanted now into permanent pots. Those are more types of peppers and cucumbers and peas and others I don't recall this minute.
There are 16-18 cups of seeds under the grow lamp, more Deck Corn up, more tomatoes (see Typhoon green coming up this morning), more cucumbers (see green on one cup), two types sunflowers already up, one T squash I can see green coming up. These seeds were planted this past Monday using Espoma seed starter. To have seedlings come up four days after planting is great.
Last year in about April when I started, I knew nothing. Now, I have so many foods grown from seed and growing so well, I dub myself a “fantastic” gardener. :o)
Molasses and Milk, and dried Molasses, and cornmeal is something that they tout a lot around here.
I think Medina is one brand of these products availiable at nurseries.
Thank you rightly. Last year the squash bugs had a field day
with everyone’s squash. So this year, hopefully we can find
something to rid the critters.