With the beanstalks over our heads and the Japanese beetles about to begin the process of stripping their leaves, driving us into a murderous rage, we called up Jim White, creator of an eco-friendly insect repellent called Anti-Pest-O, to talk about bugs and how we might dispense with them in the garden without relying on hard-core chemicals.

The Portland resident came up with the formula for his product in the late 1990s as a form of self-defense when he was working as a botanist; every time he sprayed his plants with pesticides he broke out in a rash and/or developed a cough.

Gordon Chibroski/Staff Photographer

We talked spicy ingredients, his days of making the concoction by blender at home and the secret world of perfume research.

BACK STORY: White is originally from New Hampshire. He studied botany in Australia at the University of New South Wales and came to Maine “basically looking for a job.”

He “kicked around doing a few things” and then went into the top-secret perfume research business. He was growing flowers on a 50-acre farm in Denmark he’d leased. Are we talking Opium or Chanel No. 5? White isn’t telling: “I was doing research work for a couple of perfume companies, but it’s very proprietory.” But, he said, we “probably would” recognize the names if we heard them.

NOT ALL ROSES: “I had these little guys that were attacking the flowers,” White said. Commercial pesticides helped. With the bugs anyway. “Sure it was mitigating the little guys, but it was doing a number on me.” While he coughed and scratched, he started doing his own research.

“Being a botanist, I had a discussion with Mother Nature and we decided that in her repertoire there must be a combination of something that would work.”

He played around with various formulas for two years, including one that was all garlic. “Some of it worked, some of it didn’t,” he said. When he arrived at the final formula, it contained garlic, habanero peppers (“they’re the hottest”) and a derivative of the neem tree.

NEEM NEED: Anti-Pest-O is described as eco-friendly rather than, say, pesticide-free. If it’s mostly garlic and habanero peppers, what gives? It’s the neem oil, which is a fairly well-known ingredient in other “green” repellents.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies neem oil as a biopesticide and regulates any products that contain it. Anti-Pest-O contains azadirachtin, which is derived from the seeds of the neem tree and functions as a growth disruptor on insects. It’s considered “relatively non-toxic,” but it’s no garlic. And White insists neem doesn’t work as well without the garlic/habanero combination.

PSYCHIC SIDEKICK: White started selling his products at a friend’s store back in the late 1990s. It was “one of the original hydroponic stores that sold equipment to marijuana growers,” White said. He was making the stuff in his kitchen in a blender and slapping on the most basic of labels, printed out on his home computer.

Sales went well enough that White bought a few more blenders and ramped up production on Anti-Pest-O.

Where did that name come from? “At the time I was married to this gal who claimed to be psychic,” he said. “She got up one morning and said, ‘I’ve got a name for your product.’ ”

ROUND TWO: This isn’t an easy rags-to-riches story, though. White ran into an obstacle: The Maine Board of Pesticide Control called to remind him the neem ingredients required regulation. Then, a week later, White had a stroke. (Today he still has about 15 percent paralysis from his right shoulder to right toe.) Unable to run the company, he passed the reins to “a couple of guys that had a world of corporate experience.”

They got the product through the EPA regulation process but ran out of money, and Anti-Pest-O was shuttered in 2003. White took time to recuperate and provide day care for his new granddaughter. Once she hit school age, he decided to revisit his old product.

“I said, I still believe in it, so I’ll call Washington, D.C., and see what I can do.” He registered it with the EPA and then sought out investors, but he said he met resistance from at least one potential investor because Anti-Pest-O doesn’t kill the bugs. “I said the world is changing, and you’ve got to, too,” White said. Investor Bill Whitmore of Gold Beacon Capital signed on, and they started production last summer.

Although Anti-Pest-O is made in Portland, none of the ingredients comes from Maine. Typically the habanero peppers come from a farm in South Carolina and the garlic from California, Whitmore said. Whole Foods stores throughout New England are stocking Anti-Pest-O, as well as Lowe’s stores in Maine.

ABOUT THOSE BEETLES: On a trial at Source’s test garden – OK, this reporter’s flower beds – the Anti-Pest-O, which does smell vaguely and pleasantly of an Italian deli, drove the aphids off echinacea but did nothing to stop the march of the reddish-orange lily beetles up the stalks of five or six tiger lilies.

White promises that a pressure sprayer would fix that problem. He said he used it on Japanese beetles that were feeding on grapevines. “They just sat there,” he said. But two days later, he said, they were gone.

Testing continues at Source’s test garden, although we reserve the right to resort to our usual methods of picking them off and dropping them in soapy water to drown.