Can Paprika Help Tomato Plants From Being Eaten by Bugs?

Paprika the Pepper

• Paprika is a member of the pepper family. Along with chile peppers, dill, ginger, red and black paper, paprika contains capsaicin, the heat producing element in hot sauces, Tabasco and Mexican food. The paprika peppers are harvested, dried and ground to make the popular paprika spice. Like all plants the paprika pepper has its own problems with insects, so the plant itself is not a natural bug barrier.

Paprika and Pests

• Capsaicin is an irritant to many living creatures. Peppers that are high in capsaicin are used in pepper spray, the attacker repellent used by police to subdue violent subjects and kept in women's handbags to ward off muggers. Unlike it's more potent relatives, paprika contains relatively low levels of capsaicin, but something about it really irritates ants. When mixed with other ground and dried peppers, paprika wards off two specific tomato pests – onion and root maggots and ants.

Preparing Hot Dust

• Buying enough processed ground pepper can be expensive, but you can grow the ingredients in your own garden, dry them and grind them yourself to make a hot pepper dust for your garden. You'll need dry red peppers, chile peppers, dill and paprika. Once the peppers are dry, grind them with a mortar and pestle by hand or with a coffee grinder or other similar appliance. Be sure and wash your hands after handling hot dust.

Application

• Put the hot pepper dust in a large sprinkler bottle. Walk up and down the rows sprinkling the dust around the base of the fully grown plants out to the width of the foliage crown. A fine sprinkling is all that's necessary. Refresh the dust after a rain or irrigating. This should keep ants off your plants. To protect seedlings from onion maggots, dust the seedlings and the soil at least 6 inches on either side of the rows to repel onion and root maggots.