insecticidal soap

[VickiC]

Hi Andrew,
Now that you've helped me by explaining the ingredients that I need to be most concerned about, I searched and found a comment on gardenguides.com: Potassium salts of fatty acids comprise a percentage of typical commercial insecticidal soaps. For example, the Garden Safe product contains just 1 percent of this chemical and 99 percent inert ingredients. However, Safer’s Insecticidal Soap contains 50 percent potassium salts of fatty acids.

I also checked Ortho, and found that the ingredient proportions is the same as Garden Safe.

Thanks for steering me in the right direction,
Vicki

Originally Posted by Andrew

What you're after is something that contains potassium salts of fatty acids. This is the active compound in Safer's soap. According to th Scott's website Ortho's soap contains potassium salts of fatty acids so it should be comparable to Safer's.
The Garden safe website doesn't list the active ingredients for their soap but if you check the label I suspect it will also be the same (NB they may list it as the actual fatty acid being used eg potassium oleate).

When people talk about Safer's being better for plants, they're usually making the comparison against harsh detergents like dish washing liquid rather than other insecticidal soaps that contain the same active ingredient.