This Spicy Natural Pesticide Really Works!

Gardening is a tough game. You put hours and hours of work and loving care into growing something wonderful from a tiny little seed. But then, a pesky rodent comes by and feasts upon all the fruits of your hard, time-consuming labor. You don’t want to use toxic pesticides, but you definitely don’t want to be putting all this effort into providing a mouse’s dream buffet either.

Well, you’re in luck. After four years of extensive research, scientists have discovered the perfect compound for keeping pests from snacking on your garden seeds. The answer? Ghost peppers.

It’s beautiful and simple and makes total sense, but let’s dig into the details anyways. 

Conservationists have been trying to restore America’s once-majestic grasslands with native flora for years to no avail. If you haven’t heard about the efforts to rebalance and restore the West’s disappearing prairies—an environment traditionally biodiverse and rich in plant and animal life—read up on it here.

Whenever fresh seeds were planted, happy little mice kept gobbling them up, leaving the grasslands relatively barren. But you can’t blame the mice. Encountering that sort of dense cache of food is pretty rare out in the wild, and you can be sure they took advantage!

So conservationist researchers decided to search for a natural plant compound that would make the seeds less enticing to the mice, while still encouraging germination. It also had to be a substance that wouldn’t wash off for at least a few months. Sounds like a tall order, eh? Not if you’re dealing with ghost peppers.

HOW GHOST PEPPERS DETER GARDEN PESTS

Capsaicin, the spicy compound in peppers, has long been known to deter rodents. In fact, capsaicin is the natural form of secondary defense for pepper plants to prevent them from being eaten.

When the capsaicin-rich pepper is ground up and applied to other seeds, those seeds gain the same protection of that valuable second level of defense. And since the pepper powder is all-natural and just incredibly unpleasant, it doesn’t get much more gentle for pests or plants. Wins all around!

When researchers dusted the seeds in ghost pepper powder—a notoriously high capsaicin pepper—the number of seeds consumed by mice dropped by a very impressive 86 percent, allowing them to make significantly more headway in replanting the grasslands.

If you’re trying to grow grass, regrow native flora, or protect a garden, ghost pepper powder may be the economical, natural, and effective solution you’ve been searching for. Who knew natural pesticides research could be so spicy?