In the Garden

Did you know you can mix up five herbal oils and make your own bug spray?

Mary Larkin has been doing it for years — first for herself, then for her husband and his construction crews, then a wider circle of friends and gardening clients.

This spring, she decided to go big-time and really market and sell her all-natural Honey Birch Farms bug spray. I wrote an article in today’s paper about Mary and her bug spray.

Here’s Mary in her Southeast kitchen, mixing up a batch.

Another of Mary.

She gave me a bottle to try a couple of weeks ago and I love the stuff. It doesn’t stink and smell fake or chemically like others I use.

Bugs really like me. (I’m one of those people that gets taken on picnics as bait. In a crowd of 20, I’m often the only one getting bitten.)

To make the bug spray, she starts with five essential oils: lemongrass, eucalyptus, citronella, juniper and rosemary.

Mixes them up.

Then she pours the final mix into 8-ounce blue bottles.

She keeps the bottles in this old tin container to catch the runoff.

And the finished bottles. Sorry for blurry, but it’s the only closeup of the bottle that I shot. You can go to Mary’s Web site, honeybirchfarms.com, for a better photo (and ordering/buying info).

Mark Vergari also shot video for a TV segment that’s supposed to run tomorrow on our Hudson Valley NewsCenter Now show on RNN cable TV.

Here’s Mark.

Mary’s also a really good gardener. Here’s an earlier post of mine about her work on Michael Fuch’s garden in Katonah.

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