Here's how I concoct a garlic wash to spray on young plants to deter razor toothed little slugs and snails from devouring them.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hello, welcome back. This week I'm going to be showing you how to make a garlic wash to
00:19spray on the plants directly to try and keep the slugs and the snails away. Slugs and snails
00:25do not like the strong scents of various plants including garlic. So you can make a solution
00:32of spray the plants and hopefully that will prevent them from being attacked. So we'll
00:41get started here now. So here are some of the things that you're going to need and here's
00:48the finished product. I've already done a batch of this and this is undiluted and it's
00:55really really smelly because there's a lot of garlic involved here. So what you'll need
01:04is a spray bottle, just any old spray bottle. I use two full garlic bulbs. You need a sieve.
01:24If you can get thin paper towels, a kitchen roll, a chopping board and lastly a big pan and we're
01:36just going to fill this now with some water. First things first, we'll get the water on the
01:58bottom of the pot. So all I'm going to do now is crush the garlic with a knife and put the camera down with me.
02:21All I'm doing, you could bash this, you could put it in a bag and bash it all. It would probably be
02:25easier actually if you had a heavy enough object like a rolling pin. All I'm doing is crushing the
02:33cloves. I'm not peeling them or anything. The skins and all are going in. It's just to release some of the chemicals in the garlic.
02:46Break it up and just do that for each of them. This is very rough. These are quite old garlic bulbs but it lost none of their smell and that's the important thing for this.
03:06The benefits of doing this is it's organic, it won't cause any harm to the creatures in the garden.
03:23The one drawback of it is that if you're in a rainy place like I am here in Ireland, you'll have to keep reapplying it after the rain.
03:46Hopefully the cloves will get the message and won't come looking after a while. So it may not matter if you don't do it every time.
04:03But out of these two cloves you should get a really good batch of garlic.
04:21I'll boil that now for about 10 minutes or so and then leave it to cool before we move on to the next process which is straining it.
04:41With these cloves in there you can also reuse them and peel them and chop them and reuse them for bolognese sauce or garlic butter or anything. So there's no wastage that way.
04:58I'll just put the skins now into the bin and we'll wait for that to boil.
05:07So as you can see here now this has been boiling now for about 10 minutes and I'm just going to turn it off here.
05:17Oof!
05:23Real strong smell of garlic there.
05:25You can just see there all the cloves.
05:38Now you can leave that to cool and simmer for a while, settle.
05:46What I've done is I've switched the colander for a metal one so I can just pour it straight in.
05:57I'll just show you that now.
06:02And the reason why you put kitchen roll or paper towel inside it is to catch any wee gritty bits so that the nozzle on your sprayer doesn't get clogged.
06:19And it does take a while to drain.
06:26Ooh, there we go.
06:57I'm just using one sheet as well. It helps speed up the process.
07:04That kitchen roll will catch any little sediment or anything that's in the boiled mixture.
07:16There we have it. It's almost clear in product.
07:20I'll just pour this into a jug coming out. This is an old garland jug.
07:26Which will likely forever smell of garlic though.
07:29And then...
07:35Add some more.
07:56This really is super potent and I've been using it now for about 10 days and it seems to be working.
08:13Some of the plants that were being eaten alive are making a bit of a comeback.
08:17But then the wind came and snapped a few of the stems so it's not one thing, it's the other.
08:26Hopefully we'll have some better weather coming up soon here in Ireland.
08:39That's the second lot and...
08:46I'll just do the rest now.
08:50Just dump in all the garlic cloves.
08:56I'm just going to give it a wee press.
09:27So as I was saying you can reuse these, peel them. These are quite old garlic cloves so I probably won't reuse these ones.
09:42But I did the last ones and made some garlic butter with just some vegan margarine and some mixed herbs.
09:53Chop these up and mix it in through. You could also use it to make a base for sauces or anything like that.
10:02So here we have the garlic stock now.
10:08What I'm going to do, you probably should let this cool but just for the purposes of this video I'm just going to fill this mostly with water.
10:16I'm quite confident now that this won't, because it's been sieved, it won't salt up the nozzle here.
10:24So I'll just get some water on this.
10:39There we are.
10:41And that's about three quarters of a litre there maybe.
10:50I'll just top it up here now with about a hundred millilitres of that.
11:04Give it a shake and we'll take it out now and spray some of the plants out here.
11:34Thanks for watching!