Produce > Pests & Diseases

Damping off

<< < (4/4)

Digeroo:
I would like a fungicide to use on courgettes.   Maybe cinnamon or chamomile will do that job as well.

Obelixx:
Worth a try then.  You need to steep fresh or dried chamomile flowers in boiled water till it cools then strain and apply as a spray.

1/4 to 1/2 a cup of whole chamomile flowers
2 cups of boiling water

The drained flowers can go on the compost heap.

It works as a preventive spray for damping off but also a cure for molds such as powdery mildew and botrytis if used early enough when you spot the problem.

Vinlander:

--- Quote from: Biscombe on March 27, 2007, 13:19:56 ---Bit of info here

http://tomclothier.hort.net/page13.html
--- End quote ---
Your first move should be to increase the drainage, if that doesn't work use sterile seed compost (even safer to use any medium you have if you microwave it in a cardboard box or in containers you use for meals).

No mention of using bicarb solution in the link above (potassium bicarb is said to be even better) - it's crazy to use any newly created molecule as your first response to anything - of the thousands released over the last 70 years, all but a few were banned for home use a few years later - most of the remaining ones are banned somewhere in the world, and the rest only evade this by being too new to have been caught out yet.

On the other hand the old (simple) copper fungicides (basically neutral solutions of copper hydroxide or copper carbonate) have been banned now despite the fact that they have been working harmlessly since the mid-1800s (1840 if you count the copper refinery whose smoke accidentally kept blight off several square miles of potatoes).

The zealots who trumpet that copper is poisonous ignore the fact that the easiest way to buy copper compounds is as an animal feed additive to improve the health of mammals on a poor diet (we need it too, we just get enough from a more varied diet - the WHO said in  1998 "there is greater risk of health effects from deficiency of copper intake than from excess of copper intake"). So there are literally $#!tloads of copper on pasture and always have been.

These zealots helped the 'cide companies get cheap copper off the market, and those companies are now selling new copper compounds (all more complex & often chlorinated) which are relatively untried, but are presumably more profitable - certainly much more than selling the ingredients for copper sulphate and lime solutions that are mixed at the last moment to make proper neutral bordeaux or the washing soda (instead of lime) that makes burgundy mix.

Neither of these mixes is anything like as effective if they are made as a single solution from a packet, as you don't get the short-lived colloidal copper you need.

Rant over,

Cheers.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page