i am not adverse to their use .... if used properly, according to all instructions ... i prefer not to use them in the house .... but when it comes to the bugs or my family ... bugs lose ... i work under the assumption that ONE application of a systemic bug killer, is not an EXPOSURE significant enough to do any harm ... i mean i am not a mouse, force fed my bodyweight of the chemical every day for a month to see what affect will occur ... but for houseplants, i would prefer to apply the systemic in late summer and prepare the plants for being indoors....in summer you should repot you houseplants with sterilized soil ... then after a recovery period.. treat with an appropriate systemic insecticide [or nonchemical alternative] and then take them in the house ... as usual .. an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure ... if you have to treat them in the house ... i have foudn the bathtub to be a good place to spray them down ... close the door.. put on the fan .. until they dry ... then return them to the house in general ... why not isolate the application ... also as usual ... moderation is best... you dont have to go nuclear in trying to solve a bug issue in the house ... its not worth shortening your life to kill a bug ... long ago .. when i was single [meaning no lids in the house].. i had a bunch of light stands in the house... and was not aware of soil sterilization and general preventative bug management.. in the dead of winter... i was invaded .... my stroke of genius was to work out the logic that these things happen when dogs bring fleas into the house .. which the dog never did, bless him .. but that lead me to speak with a vet about flee bombs in the house .. they are general bug killers.. and made for use in the house .... not prefered ... but sometimes you hit your limit .... one thing for sure.. i didnt have spiders for years after.. lol ... nor the fungus gants ..... or any other problems ... but i read all the intstructions.. and did what they said ... and this did not solve the problem of bug larvae in the soil ... it only knocked down the adult population ... my opinion ... is that a single application is an insignificant exposure, when done properly and according to all instruction .. and a lot cheaper than years of psychiatric after care ... lol ... ken PS: to answer the question specifically .. the concern is over-exposure over time .... IMHO .. one exposure, one time.. done properly ...is not an issue...

jean001a, plants were outdoors. From the link I posted: "...tested it on a few older plants for a couple of days, tested it on a couple of newer plants for 12 hours. Ok, no damage, good to go. Applied it liberally, following the instructions to the letter, at night when it was 65 degrees." Slimy_okra, Product Description Kills and repels garden insects and mites. Kills exposed eggs, larvae and adult stages. ENVIRONMENTALLY SAFE �" WORKS ON CONTACT! SPRAY AND HARVEST ON SAME DAY! KILLS ON CONTACT NET CONTENTS: 24 FL. OZ. (1 PT. 8 FL. OZ. / 709 mL) Active Ingredients: Rosemary Oil â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦.. 0.25% Peppermint Oil â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦0.25% Thyme Oil â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦.. 0.25% Clove Oil â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦. 0.25% Other Ingredients*â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦. 99.00% Total â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦â¦. 100.00% *Water, Mineral Oil (USP), Octadecenoic Acid Potassium Salt, Lecithin

Don't forget to pack that laptop for the stay. We'll keep you in more stitches than Dr.Richard! ***** HA!!!!! No laptop here so I'll be going thru withdrawl from online reading and posting and the various e-mails I get. More than that I'll be missing the Rome, Italy tennis OPen but I will be home in time to see the French Open, tennis nit that I am. I do have my priorities. ( smile) And nope, I won't be tip toeing thru the tomatoes in the near future, if ever again. One of the four quad muscles I tore never came back to function after the repair so that knee buckles all the time, besides which I'll probably have to have surgery sometime for my severe spinal stenosis, but I don't even want to go there. LOL So it looks as though I'll be using this walker for the near future, whatever that means. So I'll just have to enjoy being kept in online stiches after I get home again and can read here and there. Of course Richard will have me in stiches, and I mean more than sutures, b'c he has a wicked sense of humor. LOL Off topic as can be but I'll give you one example. After the left new hip went in last June I lost both bowel and bladder function which has been attributred to my being diabetic and sensitivity to Morphine and similar. When I told him that it took five people to catheterize me, which I'm sure he already knew, he calmly ASAP said: consecutively or simultaneously. LOL Richard is a Master of repartee and I gave him a book on same. One in that book that I remember well was when someone asked Ghandi what he thought of Western Civilization he said he thought it would be a good idea. LOL And so it goes and I'm off now to take a last drive to look at the wildflowers I can see from the car. I know the coltsfoot and Hepatica are out and I have Bloodroot here at home that's out, but I was hoping to see some early Trilliums and possibly some wild Columbine, the latter of which I also have here at home but here it's not out yet. And then to start packing since tomorrow looks very busy indeed. Sigh. Carolyn

Hazel, Hmmm, I have rarely seen aphid molt. I guess the ladybugs eat them before they live long enough to molt. Honestly, we have almost too many ladybugs--they try to come into the house to overwinter. I let them stay in the mudroom but they cannot come any further into the house or I vacuum them up and dump them back outdoors, so instead they overinter in the insulated barn-style garage and in the greenhouse, which is great since I have some plants overwintering in the greenhouse every year. I feel like once you get a good ladybug population established (and it has begun...because you have ladybugs in the garden), the aphids are a very brief problem and then the ladybugs gobble them up and that is that. If the damage to the foliage is not too extensive, the tomato plants will put out new foliage within the next couple of weeks and should survive. If the the damage is too severe, they won't. It really is a case of just waiting and watching and seeing what happens. I'm sorry the homemade soap spray damaged your tomato plants. I see that all the time here in southern OK, even as early as March if we are having high temperatures in the 90s, which happens occasionally (we even hit the 90s on a day or two in February this year). Our sunlight and heat are just too intense for homemade soap sprays to be successfully used without a high risk of damage, especially on tomato foliage which is very tender and easily damaged by many things. If I have to use insecticidal soap at all, I use a commercially prepared one. They are made in a way that their droplets of soap are smaller and less likely to damage anything. Still, because soaps can cause damage, I rarely use a soap spray when we are hitting highs any higher than 80 degrees, and I rarely use one in the sunshine. If I have to use soap sprays, I use them in the evening after the garden is shaded by adjacent trees, and I don't use them often. I can, in fact, go years without using a soap spray. Really, with most insects, if I cannot handpick and drown them, snip them in half with scissors, or kill them with an organic bait (like SlugGo Plus for snails, slugs, pillbugs, sowbugs and cutworms or Semaspore for grasshopper nymphs), I just leave them alone and let them be about 99.9% of the time. If I am patient, the beneficial insects, toads, frogs, birds, lizards, turtles, etc. will eat a majority of the pest insects for me. Some things, like stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are hard to catch and kill and I don't like to spray broad-spectrum insecticides (not even organic ones), so I just do the best I can with those. Sometimes I can snip a stink bug or leaf-footed bug in half with my garden scissors, but a lot of the time they get away from me. With the similar squash bugs, I keep a lint roller in my garden tool bucket and roll it over them, picking them up with it. Then I quickly peel that part of the lint roller paper off the roller and wrap it around them, firmly entrapping them, and I put them in a trash can with a lid so they cannot escape if they somehow manage to get free of the lint roller paper. Rainy years are always more challenging. I haven't used Miracle Grow on any plants yet, but I wouldn't hesitate to use it if the constant rainfall starts keeping the plants from taking up nutrients with their roots. Sometimes a good foliar feeding will help struggling plants, whether you use MG, Liquid Kelp, Fish Emulsion, Compost Tea, Garrett Juice (more as a plant tonic than a fertilizer) or whatever. Once your soil is more well-established and has the right level of biological activity in the soil, your organic fertilizers will be adequate to support great plant health, growth and productivity most years. There's a terrific book by Jeff Gilman about what truly works in organic gardening. It is called "The Truth About Organic Gardning: Benefits, Drawbacks and The Bottom Line". I really like this book. It was published in 2008 but I didn't read it until a couple of years ago. I had gardened 99.9% organically since 1999 (and even before that I didn't use synthetic pesticides more than maybe once a year and didn't like them either) so felt I understood organic gardening pretty well already, but really enjoyed the book anyway as it helped me understand some of the science behind some common organic practices. I like his scientific approach to studying organic practices to see what actually does work and what doesn't work and I like his explanations about why some things work and others don't seem to. Before I got the book, I was concerned that maybe he was sort of anti-organic, as many other university horticulture professors seem to be, but he isn't. His explanations on every topic in the book just blow me away in their thoroughness and in the way he looks at all sides of an issue. I really love this book, and have been meaning to get his other book and read it too. One section early in this book really gave me a lot of food for thought. It was subtitled "How organic is organic enough?" and made me rethink some long-held beliefs. From the first day we broke ground here (and, lol, we broke ground for our first garden here a year before the builder broke ground to build the house), my primary focus always has been on building healthy soil. If you focus on building healthy soil that is rich in organic matter, all your other garden problems become minor issues. However, building healthy soil takes time, especially if you are doing it in drought years when there is very little moisture. It took me a good ten years to get our soil to the point that I really was happy with its improvement, and at least half those years were horrendous drought years when nothing I did seemed to keep the garden as happy and as productive as I wanted it to be. (Rain does make a huge difference, as does the absense of rain.) Conversely, without healthy soil teeming with microbes, it is hard to have a healthy organic garden. I have focused so long on feeding the soil and letting the soil feed the plants that it is hard for me to suggest to someone that maybe there are times when a synthetic fertilizer would be beneficial, but there are times when it is....and your situation is likely to be one of them. I used Miracle Grow liquid fertilizer without hesitation in our early years here when the soil wasn't yet in good shape and didn't feel bad about it. I still use the Miracle Grow Moisture Control soil-less mix for growing on seedlings (after starting them in a sterile, soil-less mix) and I use it in all my containers at times, though I still add all the rotted wood and leaf mold and compost that I can to the containers as well. (Growing in containers is an entirely different process from growing in the ground, so you have to adapt your practices accordingly,and I learned that slowly and the hard way over many years of growing in containers.) In 2007 we had so much rain that my plant roots stayed waterlogged, and it was foliar feeding with Miracle Grow that saved the tomato and pepper plants and gave us a harvest that summer. Otherwise, I think we would have gotten almost nothing from the constantly-waterlogged garden. At that point, our soil was not in the fine condition that the soil in the raised beds now is in. Last year, we had more than twice as much rain as we had in 2007 (78" versus 2007's 37" or 38"), and the soil is so much better now that I didn't have the same issues with plant roots being too clogged with water to function properly and I didn't have to foliar feed with anything. It is amazing what a difference a few more years of soil improvement has made. Oh, and I should clarify---it wasn't that the rainfall was so heavy overall in 2007 as our rainfall barely was average for the year overall, it is just that so much of it fell in late spring and early summer all at once that the heavy moisture overwhelmed the plant roots). If I learned anything at all from last year's flooding and constant moisture, it was that we finally, maybe, had the soil I'd been working so hard to achieve, in all ut the newest raised beds (and they still have a long way to go). Every year has its own challenges. In a drought year, as long as I water with soaker hoses or drip irrigation lines, I never have to use a fungicide at all---not a synthetic one and not an organic one. The challenge in that sort of year isn't foliar disease like it is in a very wet year, it is simply the lack of moisture, the often insane heat, and the traveling hordes of grasshoppers that fly in from adjacent fields and can strip a garden bare in just a day or two. You just deal with whatever happens in any given year, learn from that year, and use what you learned the next time we have a year with similar weather. One of the challenges of growing here is that one year we'll have hot weather and almost no rain and the next year it will be much milder and wetter and we almost forget what heat and drought can do to a garden. It seems we rarely have the same weather two years in a row, so often we're scrambling to deal with whatever Mother Nature throws at us. It keeps us on our toes. Dawn