FARMER'S VIEW OF MITES

[Guest guest]

Bill sent me this:

FARMER'S VIEW OF MITES

Here is a farmer's view of mites, with his family's handed down solutions. His points? Mites are neither new nor foreign.--KJ

"I was raised on a farming ranch in Louisiana, which is called "semitropical," and where I still live. There are many types of mites that bite people, but I can only list a few here.

[by the way] Warm-blooded animals get lice; plants get lice; however, these are not the same type of lice. The "lice" that infest your turnip greens will not bite you because it suddenly "got warmer" in the US.

However, the mites and lice that infest your chicken house will not be satisfied with turnip greens, but will crawl all over you, giving you the "itch" for many days after you get rid of them.

Redbugs [also known as chiggers] are picked up from walking through unmown grass, brush, and even sometimes dirt. They burrow under your skin and make you want to take a wire brush to it.

Seed ticks will cover you if you brush against the wrong tree limb. They will also infest your living room when you buy that "real" Christmas tree.

Dog or sarcoptes mange, which humans dislike calling scabies, will infest all your pets--AND you.

The creeping crud is a fungus that may not display visible symptoms for months, but before that will make you claw until you bleed. It usually starts at the ankles and works up; it lives in the soil.

Hog lice, chicken mites, ring worm, and scores of other fungi and bacteria from livestock and pets also readily get on humans.

While we backwoods country people might…seem stupid to some, we know these critters you are talking about. They were here long before you, [your son, your brother, or your mother] went overseas. It is just as possible that [you or they got] their critter on a Georgia camping trip as from Iraq. We have long used these remedies--

· Bathed with 1 or 2 capfuls of pine oil or bleach

· Cleaned our houses with pine oil.

· Dabbed pine oil, turpentine, or, if desperate enough, coal oil, on redbugs, and on various other critters that attached themselves to us.

· Coated ourselves with various kinds of fats, mud, and pastes to keep [the critters] off, and to kill them when they decided to live on us anyway.

· Bathed in baking soda, table salt, and epsom salt to keep from itching.

· Smeared a paste made from mustard, baking soda, and tobacco.

· Put the skin from inside eggshells on bad bites to draw out the itch.

· Chewed on the sulphur ends of hard matches.

· Made a paste from flowers of sulfur [now called sublimed sulfur]. Bugs hate the smell of sulfur, and it protects the bites from infection.

One of the bad things about itchy bites is it all that scratching [results in] hot, bleeding flesh, which attracts even more critters.

As for borax: you can buy 20 Mule Team Borax powder; it's been around longer than any of us. We wash with it, neutralize orors with it, remove stains with it, and so on.

Most of all, down here, we have been rubbing it on our meat in our smoke houses for ages; flies won't even light on it. we just wash [the borax] off when we take [the meat] out to eat.

I heard in the 80's that eighties, that recycled, [torn] up newspapers were being blown into the walls of old historical homes to insulate them. Guess what they were soaking the news paper in prior to drying and chopping it up? That's right...[good old] Borax. You can--

Use it to kill and repel bugs, repel rodents, and prevent [rodents] from chewing and nesting in the paper insulation.

Use it to make [flammables like] newspaper fire retardant.

Make your on roach and ant bait by mixing borax with flour and sugar, or just with corn syrup and Borax.

Use it like carpet fresh.

Wash your walls and floors and counters with it.

Use it as a paste for scrubbing; just don't rinse it too well.

For people [who want clean clothes that are free of] fragrance fumes, and so on, use it as a laundry detergent.

If the varmints are eating your ankles up, mix borax with your lotion or vaseline to [repel and heal]."

KJ