Thyme oil garden soap

I've discovered red aphids on my tomatoes. It was a dark day the first time I saw them. I thought they were some type of mite because I didn't know aphids could be red. Of course, I immediately turned to the World Wide Web to figure out what the little creatures were and how to unleash a safe and organic version of a nuclear bomb to eradicate them from my yard forever. Do you know what I found out? I read over and over on various sites that a soap and water solution spritzed on my plants and on the little red buggers would take care of the problem. And you know what? It helped a lot. Well, I also discovered that a lot of commercially produced organic insecticides contain white thyme oil. So, last weekend I whipped up a batch of this wicked cool thyme-oil garden soap.

Canola oil: 4 oz
Crisco: 8 oz
Soybean oil: 4 oz
White thyme essential oil: 1/2 oz

Potassium hydroxide (KOH): 3 oz
Water: 6 oz

First off, all ingredients are measured by weight. I dumped all of the oils/fats into my crockpot to heat up and liquefy. In a glass measuring cup, I added the KOH to the water. Once the KOH water had stopped fizzing and popping and all of the fats were melted, I added the KOH water to the fat and started stirring. Now, you don't really have to stand over the crockpot all day, but I pretty much do because I am pathologically anal retentive. Really, just giving it a stir every hour or two would be fine. After several hours it will turn into a stiff and sticky amber-colored mess and if you haven't made hot-process liquid soap before you will be certain that it is ruined. Turn the heat down and add a couple of cups of water. It will take a while, but the soap starts melting into the water and becoming liquid soap-y. Add more water a cup or two at a time until the soap is mostly melted and turn off the heat. When it was cool enough to safely pour, I poured it into a two-liter soda bottle and filled it up the rest of the way with water. The consistency was still a little thick, but since I only made it for diluting in a spritz bottle, that wasn't really a problem.

There's no reason you couldn't use this as a hand soap. It is very mild, but you would have a bit of a culinary aroma about you. I didn't formulate the recipe to be especially cleansing or conditioning, I just picked out the cheapest oils I had in my kitchen. Then I plugged the info into a soap calculator to figure out how much KOH to use. I used a 0% lye discount since I didn't care about it being conditioning and also because I didn't know the saponification value of the thyme oil.

This soap is a cinch to make. If you are a first-time soaper, this would be an easy place to start. I would recommend visiting this site first to get some good basic soapmaking info and lye-handling wisdom.

Results? Well, it may be too early to tell for sure, but it seems to me to be working well. I've been spritzing all of my veggies and roses like crazy. When I spot the tiny red demons, I switch the nozzle on my spray bottle to "firehose" setting and blast them directly. They, um, don't like that very much. But I do. He he he.