I want to open this thread for us to put our heads together and talk about creative and/or improvisational, yet successful, ways that we have treated our house plants for pests.

I recently had an English ivy get attacked by spider mites. (Of course. D'oh!) I got the commercial mite killer (Mite-X) and man, I might as well have been spraying hopes and wishes. Didn't do a damn thing. So I surfed around and found some recipes for homemade pesticides and didn't quite follow a particular one but just kind of riffed off of a few of them. Mine had castile soap (Doctor Bronner's, unscented), water, cayenne, rosemary oil, peppermint oil, and a little vegetable oil. At first I tried spraying it on the plant. It worked better than the commercial stuff but...still not great. So then I got mad. I got so mad at those stupid spider mites. I mustered up all of my righteous anger, I wadded up some paper towel, sprayed it with my concoction, and I began grumpily wiping down each leaf, top and underside, one by one. The plant smelled like rosemary for a week, which wasn't so bad but it was weird for sure. Eventually I rinsed it to get the remnants of the stuff off of it. And, knock on wood, no spider mites have appeared since. Now unfortunately, the plant may still not survive because it took me so long to get the infestation under control and probably because of all the crap being sprayed on it early on in the process. It has lost a lot of leaves and looks kind of scraggly and sad. But, at least it's bug-free. So I just wanted to share this method that I sort of improvised and found successful, and also to ask, because I'm curious, has anyone else ever tried this?

I'm also having pretty good success so far (although it's too early maybe to declare victory...) with the same method but with a different substance for treating mealybugs on my orchid. I'm wiping the leaves, top and bottom, with 70% isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol). I guess my point is, *wiping* seems to be really good where spraying is ineffective, and I was wondering if anyone else had a similar experience?

Aside from that, what other things have you guys tried? Creative, unusual, made-up, improvised methods...let's talk about them and learn from each other! =)