Garden Safe Insecticidal Soap
 

Good evening all. I bought Garden Safe insecticidal soap. I read the directions but didn't get clarification for orchids.

Can I mix it and pour it in the the pot?..not just spray it.

...cause that's where I see the bugs crawl out from when I water them.

Thank you very much.

Might depend on what kind of orchids you're thinking about using it on. I've both sprayed and poured insecticidal soap on a variety of orchids without them having an ill effects. Cattleyas, laelias, cymbidiums, dendrobiums, vandas and aerides were all fine with having their pots drenched with it. My not-so-great experiences with insecticidal soap involved gongoras. For some reason--and this could just have been with the plants that I had, and not necessarily the genus as a whole--they didn't react favorably to being sprayed with the soap (and after seeing how their leaves developed unsightly blotches from my application of the soap, I wasn't about to push my luck by pouring any into their pots/baskets). In my experience, insecticidal soap's been a fairly benign product (and it's a lot less prone to do nasty things to the environment, which is always a good thing in my opinion). Try it on one or two of your plants (if there are a couple that you could bear to live without, those would be excellent candidates for experimentation) and see how it goes. Good luck!

I have used it on a variety of plants , including gongora on the leaves, not drenched . But I only use in the early evening when sun is going down or on an overcast day it does have a fatty oil in it . I used once on a Catt. when sun was out and got some spots on the leaves . Might of been the reason ? Gin

smweaver, thank you very much for the detailed explanation. I don't have any Gongoras so i think I'm good.

...and I did get a chance to use it on an overcast day.

Thanks a lot.