Garlic

timah wrote:
hi again guys havnt done it yet but is garlic any good for the hermies and also how do you put photo's on the page just wishing to share some picks with hermi land.

LolaGranola? wrote:
Garlic is one of those foods that is really up in the air. It's actually a very interesting food. It has antibiotic properties and yes, it has compounds that are insect repellants. It doesn't have insecticidal properties however.

I would say that this food is probably not actually unsafe however it's questionable issues, sulfur compounds being one kind of puts it in the realm of table salt. We don't have definitive trial tested proof, but the fact that there are so many alternatives really doesn't make pushing this food an issue.

However, this is mostly in reference to raw, especially crushed garlic cloves. Minced garlic used in cooking shouldn't be an issue as the heat renders most of the harmful properties harmless.

JMThrash wrote:
Garlic does contain insecticide compounds. However, that doesn't necessarily mean trace amounts are bad. As we know, many things can be beneficial in small quantities and harmful in large quantities (like copper, which is necessary for life in small quanitities).

Looking up directions for using garlic as in insecticide, it looks like it requires an entire garlic bulb per two cups of water to be effective against tiny plant insects (like mites). Also, it's immediate, and not cummulative.

All citrus fruits also contain an insecticide element too (Limonene, probably why citrus used to be on the no-no-list, but even now it's on the EH safe list). However, I don't think anyone's experienced a crab dying from eating an orange lately.

Of all the insects usually referenced as being affected by garlic, mites are probably the closest to crabs in the genetic tree, but they still don't have the exact same anatomy, and if it takes a 1:2 concentration to kill something the size of a pinhead, I'm not immediately worried about .001 milligrams in some food. I wouldn't feed it to them raw of course though. But as LolaGranola? said in the thread Ladybug linked to, small amounts as an ingredient in food probably are benign.

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