I found this in a magazine just the other day: "TIP--Place a bunch of fresh basil on your outdoor table to repel mosquitoes." (Everyday with Rachel Ray, August, 2008, p. 113)
ABOUT REPELLING FLEASWe discovered, quite by accident, that basil repels fleas. Some years ago a friend gave us some tansy plants to hang in our garage to hopefully keep fleas off our cats. It worked! We had the same plants hanging there for several years. Then one year we pulled up a basil plant and hung it in the garage, intending to harvest the leaves. We never got around to using the leaves, but the cats continued to not have fleas. Every couple of years we hang a new basil plant. To this day our kitties remain flea-less.
Well that gave me the idea to try an experiment. If basil could repel fleas, perhaps it would also work for cabbage worms. Awhile back I was gone for 5 days. Before I left I put a few basil leaves on some of the broccoli plants. During the time I was gone Jim picked in a head of broccoli that had no basil leaves on it. Before he could cook it, he had to remove 19 cabbage worms. (Extra protein--yum) The next head we tried had been treated with some basil leaves, and there was only 1 of the green crawly critters. In previous years we have sprayed our broccoli with bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) which works really well, but this year we just didn't get around to it. Well, where do those pesky cabbage worms come from anyway? They hatch from eggs laid by cabbage butterflies. I just happened to catch a picture of one of the dastardly creatures flitting around. The tiny caterpillars that hatch from the eggs eat holes in the leaves. I've discovered that those little green eating machines can make some mighty big holes even when the caterpillars are almost too small to see. It's when they get bigger that they really bother me. They can grow to be an inch or so long. Some are solid green and very hard to see in the broccoli heads, but some are blackish with stripes. Both are yucchy and it's very nice to avoid them.
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