Scoring some catnip

Well you might be wondering what catnip has to do with praying mantises. Most likely you could care less. The fact is I am still exploring the relationship, but the immediate relationship came about by raising and feeding a few mosquitoes to my pet mantids when they were young and in the course of doing that I learned of some experiments which were being done using catnip as a mosquito repellent. I wrote an article about it earlier and posted it on this site. Anyway it seems that there is so much mis-information out there, and the chemical companies (particularly the manufacturers of deet,) have such powerful friends, that the media will not pick up the story, even with the west Nile virus spread through out the country, so I thought I would grow some and test it myself. The photo above is the first one to bloom. I will test it later this fall when my plants reach maturity. If anyone has heard any new news about this please leave a comment. As for myself, I believe the studies I have read, but still want to test it for myself. As for my cat Tessers, she seems to love the stuff and I am saving most of it for her.