help making homemade “nuke em”

somebody posted in my mite thread about a homemade nuke em spray. they shared a few ingredients like enzymes, citric acid, and a organic soap. i read the ingredients on the nuke em bottle and they include yeast. will those ingredients work without the yeast? i’m also wondering at what ratios to mix them. any help or ideas are appreciated

i’m also kind of curious why my mite infestation seems to be bad enough to kill a whole plant but i’ve never seen a single bud topped with webs like you do a lot of the pictures online

potassium salts of fatty acids = hand soap

Insecticidal soaps are basically just potassium based liquid soaps. Putting it on the soft bodies of spider mites is supposed to cause their soft bodies to melt.

i’m mainly curious about the yeast

any thoughts out there?

cincity420 said:

somebody posted in my mite thread about a homemade nuke em spray. they shared a few ingredients like enzymes, citric acid, and a organic soap. i read the ingredients on the nuke em bottle and they include yeast. will those ingredients work without the yeast? i’m also wondering at what ratios to mix them. any help or ideas are appreciated

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@cincity420,

I am that somebody!

They list it as yeast because this allows them to get the OMRI listing.
The yeast is how they grow the enzymes.

Check your messages, I left you references to two patents for how to make your own enzymes using molasses, cane sugar, yeast, and magnesium sulfate.

I hope this helps.

cincity420 said:

i’m also kind of curious why my mite infestation seems to be bad enough to kill a whole plant but i’ve never seen a single bud topped with webs like you do a lot of the pictures online

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@cincity420,
Can you post some more photos?
It may be thrips
Can you see the mites?

The only reason I say this is because I mistook thrips for mites, they are both small and have similar effects on plants, but thrips won't make webs and when they are adults they tend to fly a bit.

churchhaze said:

potassium salts of fatty acids = hand soap

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@churchhaze,
Most hand soaps are sodium based detergents.

What this means is a potassium based soap, which is usually made into liquid soaps (Dr. Bronner's) because the "cake" of potassium soaps is more of a paste rather then something that can be formed into hard bar like sodium based soaps.

This is what American settlers referred to as "soft soap", which they made by letting water trickle through the ashes from their fires to produce the potassium hydroxide necessary to saponify fat into soap. They used tallow, but when it's made with olive oil or coconut oil it's called castile soap.

cincity420 said:

i’m mainly curious about the yeast

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@cincity420,
The yeast is part of the enzyme growing process, which involves fermentation.
I am not sure why they listed yeast as an ingredient because they also have reports they post on the Nuke Em product and it clearly shows that whatever washing process they use removes all traces of yeast in the final product.

Here's the page where the batch tests are located:
https://www.flyingskull.net/Nuke-Em-Batch-Lab-Reports.html

Here are the batch test PDF's:
https://www.flyingskull.net/Dnld/Reports/LI-170727-074A_17201A_NukeEm.pdf
https://www.flyingskull.net/Dnld/Reports/LI-170426-077B_174101A_NukeEm.pdf