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Can You Use Essential Oils To Treat Plants? How To Use Essential Oils To Prevent Fungi Build Up.
Apr 27, 2022
Have you ever wondered whether or not it’s a good idea to use essential oils to treat issues with plants. This gardening in Canada video looks at using essential oils on both house plants and outdoor plants. Essential oils have been used to treat different fungal and bacterial infections and therefore theoretically it could work to treat plant ailments.
However applying essential oil’s properly to plants is key to making them work. Due to alcohol and essential oils it is important to make sure that it is not directly applied to the lease. Rather we want to apply it to a diffuser and have it treat the air.
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Show More Show Less View Video Transcript
0:00
Hello plant people! How are you guys doing today? If you're new around here, my name is Ashley and
0:04
I'm a soil scientist. On this channel I like to take the science and apply it to all things plants
0:08
And in today's video we're talking about essential oils. And this is a highly requested video from
0:15
quite a few viewers that have left in the comments different ways to use essential oils. So we have
0:19
the humidifier method which I have this lancidol humidifier here. I've been running it in-house
0:25
for about two weeks now and it has a nice little port on the back where you can actually stick
0:31
essential oils in a cotton ball or on a piece of paper towel in this little tray and put it on the
0:36
back and it emits essential oils throughout the house so it's something cool to look at there's
0:41
also of course things like diffusers there are ways to mix this in a spray there's ways to mix
0:48
this into a rub where we would actually rub it on the plants all that sort of stuff and quite
0:52
Quite honestly, when the question was first posed to me, I just thought, no, you're crazy
0:59
That doesn't even mean, I stay away from like that health food industry stuff
1:05
I just assumed this was fake. I assumed essential oils were fake, but then logic kicked in when I started actually reading
1:11
the studies on essential oils. That kind of showed a little bit of a reasoning
1:16
as to why it would work. And the big reasoning behind it is it is plants
1:21
that have just been concentrated to a point that they are beneficial in fighting fungal, bacterial
1:28
any sort of pathogenic issue. And so that is where I mostly came from, from this point
1:34
And so we're going to be talking about whether or not you can use any sort of essential oil on your
1:38
plant, whether you should use it, whether you shouldn't use it, and how I intend to use essential
1:42
oils going forward in my plant routine. One thing I will say is quality. Quality is a must
1:50
and that is something that was reiterated through the entire study or through all the studies I
1:55
looked at and they never really gave up the goods on this what brand they were using so I'm not
2:02
really sure what brand these studies were using but quality is key there is a lot of companies
2:07
out there that make fake essential oils which I'm sure are just like fragrant type things and then
2:13
there's ones that make good essential oils now I can leave an Amazon link down below both for
2:19
this here this humidifier with the essential oil thing in the back because that is the route I'm
2:24
going with the essential oils with plant care but um I can also leave a link for the essential oils
2:29
I'm using it's called nature's truth and I'm not gonna lie you guys I looked for medical grade I
2:35
look for everything I can't figure out what a good quality essential oil has I have no idea how to
2:40
understand it there's no um you know how you have like honorary or you have USDA organic certified or
2:47
you have non GMO with the butterfly in the check mark like there organizations out there that regulate a lot of different products and essential oils is a free there is no regulatory company out
3:00
there that is putting stamps saying this is a hundred from ten percent an actual essential
3:06
also business idea for anyone out there but yeah I just I couldn't find a certification type way of
3:13
doing it. So I will list what I'm using. Do I know if this is going to work? No, no idea. Quite
3:20
honestly, I'm not going to have a really good way of knowing whether or not it's going to work until
3:24
I've gone through, you know, however long of a process. So this guy here is the best that I'm
3:30
using. I'm just going to pop it in the back and we'll get into why that is. So essential oils are
3:34
essentially oils from plants that have been highly concentrated. But the thing here is that every
3:40
plant has a different property so not all plants are going to be particularly
3:45
good when it comes to their oils in fighting pathogens in general so there
3:50
is studies that have narrowed down the particularly good plants that do fight
3:55
fungal and bacterial pathogens both in the air or on top of surfaces and so the
4:01
the three big ones are thyme tea tree oil and peppermint oh and clove
4:08
peppermint and clove and so the thyme has thymol in it which is a stair are able to
4:15
sterilize surfaces or sterilize the air in some cases tea tree is rich in
4:19
terpenes do help to sterilize an area or again sterilize the air and so they
4:25
have used these in medical practices they have used them obviously in curing
4:32
different issues but no one's really talked about using these on a plant
4:35
scale and I could only really find one study that even talked about plants and it was more of on an
4:42
agricultural greenhouse perspective and they were looking at adding time in particular to
4:48
kind of like a humidifier scenario in hopes of reducing fungal spore spread and just fungal
4:56
development within that greenhouse both on the plants the soil the air with the use of essential
5:01
oils and they did find that it did reduce the potential spread of fungal spores so that's kind
5:08
of what turned my mind around into thinking about using essential oils in my plant routine the
5:17
question is should you put essential oils in a mister and then mist your plants to you know use
5:24
as a bug preventative and I don't know the answer to that I can't say for sure
5:31
whether or not it's going to work if it has worked for you in pest control
5:35
please let me know in the comments down below share your thoughts and your beliefs but I couldn find any studies on that particular topic in general but it did appear that when it comes to bacterial and fungal that this will essential oils in particular peppermint thyme clove
5:52
and tea tree will all help lessen or destroy the spread of certain bacterial
5:58
and fungal diseases particularly in plants so when we use essential oils on
6:04
the plants we want to make sure it's heavily diluted ratio and I'm talking
6:09
like two three drops per spray bottle it is concentrated and it can burn or harm
6:16
your plant leaves if used in too high of a quantity so we do want to avoid that
6:21
when possible and now what's what makes me a little bit hesitant about this is
6:25
because it is an unregulated substance I do feel as though there's likely things
6:31
like alcohols or additives in it and so I don't feel comfortable telling you to
6:38
put essential oils on your plants just in general a blanket term of yeah I've
6:42
just put your plants it'll be fine and ultimately that does come down to the
6:46
unregulated side of this industry so I I'm not gonna tell you to do it if you
6:53
do it you will kill fungi you will kill bacteria you also may kill your plant
6:57
I'm just gonna be straight up with that now with a humidifier it's a little bit
7:02
different. It's not nearly as concentrated and it will ultimately help purify your air to a point
7:10
to a point wherever the mist may touch, it will purify. So if you have a plant room or something
7:15
of that nature, you should probably have a humidifier anyways. This guy, I just turned him
7:20
in. Yeah, you guys would be surprised how dry my house is. So this is at a relative humidity of 30
7:25
and it's running. That's sad. So anyways, your humidity in your home or in your plant room in
7:34
particular, your grow tent, your indoor greenhouse, your Ikea greenhouse should be 60 plus. If you
7:39
get between 60 and 80, you're going to have some really amazing results. So you should be running
7:45
a humidifier regardless. But with this guy here, all you need to do is take a paper towel and you
7:52
literally just put some drops on here now don't look at the type I got I got eucalyptus and this
7:58
was before I decided to research I was like I gotta get essential oils for a YouTube video and then
8:03
yeah I got the wrong stuff I got the stuff without all the beneficial stuff in it okay I'm gonna put
8:11
some on there I don't know if that was too much I don't know if that wasn't enough that seems like
8:15
a lot yep that's a lot that's a lot it smells really good though really good I feel like it
8:21
got eucalyptus because I was looking at a hospital study and they were talking about
8:28
for like respiratory issues how it really common for the patients who get like this homotherapy I guess they continually will request eucalyptus and I was like oh congestion I always congested and now here we are completely for edible plants and
8:48
decided to get all selfish and think of myself so I'm gonna pop that back in there that's so
8:53
convenient oh that's instantaneous oh my goodness that smells wonderful okay now I smell like Vicks
9:01
love that for us so with these um like i said you're gonna wanna put it up to 60 or higher
9:09
that's really high but anyways um my house will never be at that level unfortunately there is
9:17
three settings i have it on max right now for uh the purpose of you know really showing off the
9:23
the vaporizing, but there is three different settings. There's a low, medium, and high
9:30
And this whole thing is a water reservoir with a water indicator on the front. Make sure it's full
9:35
Obviously, it won't run if it's not full, but it does have an automatic shutoff and I have let it
9:39
run out and it does shut off so it don't burn itself out, which is really, really nice. It does
9:45
have a UV light, which is extra sterilization. I do tend to leave that on quite a lot. I have
9:52
another humidifier in the house too same thing I leave the UV on pretty much all the time and then
9:57
there is the timer option I don't shut the timer off like I said my house is always really really
10:01
humid but see you don't want it running all day whatever the case is you can pop a timer on and
10:07
it has a remote control it has a remote control I really really like this I like this humidifier
10:13
it is way better than a diffuser I've spent money years ago on essential oil diffusers
10:18
lame. I'm done with them. This is cool though. I do enjoy this quite a bit. So you guys have to
10:26
let me know down in the comments below what you think. If you're going to try to use, you know
10:31
humidifiers with a bit of essential oils in it, or if your choice going forward is going to be
10:37
to use essential oils like in a spray scenario, whatever the case is. I'd be interested to know
10:43
I'd also be interested to know if you were a little bit hesitant about essential oils and
10:47
you kind of thought that it was like hokey pokey I don't know if it's just me or not I have no idea
10:54
I'm not gonna lie but I'm just gonna let you guys know I was not convinced prior to this video I
11:01
thought it was just like an MLM thing you just sold it because of that reason or it was like
11:09
some kind of hippie thing but apparently it's not legit it is legit which ultimately makes sense a
11:16
lot of our medications are just concentrated plants pretty much so it would make sense that's
11:22
my ignorance uh took the better of me there so i don't thank you guys for watching be sure to give
11:27
the video a thumbs up let me know in the comment down below what you think and hit that subscribe
11:31
button i'll talk to you later bye
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