Horticultural oil, also known as white oil, is an easy and inexpensive pesticide to prepare at home from readily available materials. It can be used to control scale, aphids, mealy bug, citrus leaf miner, mites and caterpillars on roses, ornamentals, citrus and other fruit trees.
The commercial horticultural oil insecticides sold in garden centres are petroleum based: essentially, refined paraffin oil with an added emulsifier to make them water soluble.
These are not the kind of thing you want in your soil as they take years to break down in the ground. A better option is to purchase a natural horticultural oil
