Grow This Tasty Plant In Your Garden To Keep The Mosquitos Away This Summer

The old saying goes, "money doesn't grow on trees." But you can grow many foods for a fraction of the cost of buying them at the store. You could plant vegetables and fresh herbs for cooking instead of buying pre-packaged cuttings and plastic-wrapped items. You can easily grow aloe for lotion as well, and if you don't have room for an air filter, spider plants can do that job and clean the air in your home. Growing self-sustaining solutions to life's day-to-day needs can truly be a rewarding experience, and the fun experiments and hacks you can grow in your yard or a container are endless. 

Take lemongrass, for example. It's worth cooking with lemongrass as it's a delicious ingredient in Asian broths. It can be used to bring a bright flavor to drinks or added as a fresh herb to elevate your lemonade, too. However, its use extends far beyond the kitchen. Lemongrass also contains citronella. When you bruise the leaves, you can create a simple yet effective mosquito repellent to keep those annoying bugs away. 

Moreover, one of the best things about lemongrass is that in certain warm climate zones (like zones 10 and 11), it's a perennial. Not only is lemongrass a delicious ingredient to have on hand for cooking, but it also has bug-repelling qualities, making it an extremely useful plant to grow in your garden. Plus, it adds a beautiful landscape feature and is also relatively easy to grow.

While lemongrass contains citronella oil, keep in mind that you have some work to do if you plan on making a proper topical mosquito repellent with it. Granted, lemongrass has been used as a medicinal herb and as a bug repellent in many ancient societies, such as in China, Thailand, and India, for centuries. But a lemongrass leaf won't stave off mosquitos without some help. The simplest way is to use some nearby lemongrass by bunching up the leaves and cutting them at the base with a knife or scissors, then crushing and twisting them with your hands before rubbing them on your skin. It's all about the bruising the leaves to release the mosquito repellant citronella, like crushing garlic and releasing allicin.

Some homemade recipes suggest extracting the oils from lemongrass by boiling the leaves, adding a pinch of salt, and letting the water sit overnight before straining into a spray bottle or dropper. Other recipes use essential oils as a base, or a combo of water and oils or alcohol to create a repellent solution. 

That being said, you may want to turn to the more processed lemongrass ointments and creams when you need a more full proof solution, which have even been proven, through scientific testing, to be an effective way to repel mosquitoes. In one experiment published in the Journal of Advanced Studies in Life Sciences, it was found that the efficacy of a lemongrass cream or ointment will deter mosquitoes, depending on how much you apply. Furthermore, while homegrown lemongrass can provide quick and brief respite from mosquitoes when crushed, DEET has been tested to be a more effective repellant overall.