Last week Mike McGrath of "You Bet Your Garden," a public radio natural gardening show, spoke about natural products that repel mosquitoes, ticks, and other annoying and potentially disease-carrying bugs. He cautioned against using products with DEET, especially with kids.

Read the entire article on the Gardens Alive website here.

One thing that caught my ear was his suggestion to use lemon balm leaves as a natural and very effective mosquito repellent. We tried it this week, with excellent results. So here's a short photo-tutorial on lemon balm, what it looks like, and how to deploy it to become uninteresting to mosquitoes.
Here's what lemon balm looks like:

It's a pretty invasive plant, at least in New Jersey and North Carolina, where I've lived, so it's probably easy to grow and hard to kill. Just don't plant it next to the prize rose bush.

Here's a closeup of the leaves:

If it looks like that and smells of lemon when you crush it between your fingers, that's probably your plant.

My daughter demonstrates the application of lemon balm. First she picks off a bit of stem and leaves:

Next she rubs the leaves between her hands to crush them and release the essential oils.

Applies the crushed leaves to her arms…

And her legs…

And everywhere she doesn't want to get bitten. Figure on needing a reapplication every couple of hours - you'll notice a couple of bites on her legs, from forgetting to reapply the rub.

If you can't find lemon balm, McGrath recommends a couple of natural products that you can buy and carry around with you: Bite Blocker” (aka “Sting Free”) and “Repel Lemon Eucalyptus Insect Repellant.”