Thursday, June 7, 2012

Anyone else getting tired of all the powdery mildew around here?

(Hi. Are you new here, or do you suffer from short-term memory loss? Or maybe you saw Men in Black 3 and had to wipe your memory to forget? You can catch up on our epic battle against powdery mildew in the greenhouse here and here.)

Life is like a box of what comes home with your husband when you send him to the garden supply store. You never know what you're going to get. 

fighting powdery mildew in the greenhouse garden

Last week you got Elementals Garden Disease Control instead of potassium bicarbonate.  But tomatoes, tomahtoes - it's still approved for organic gardening and our bemildewed vegetables need all the misting we can muster.

fighting powdery mildew

Abe took this picture shortly before I read the label to find out that (a) the active ingredient is copper, (b) you should be careful not to get this on your clothes or skin, and (c) I had just spilled it all over myself. But I don't seem to have suffered any deleterious effects, which is lucky since I also spilled it intentionally all over the vegetables I plan to eat.


The directions indicate that, like everything else, this is best used preventively for powdery mildew (once weekly or twice monthly or something), but since prevention is too late for us, we've sprayed twice this past week. So far, I can report that it either doesn't work or we need to give it more time lethal doses.
*For a helpful, searchable list of products approved for organic gardening, check out the Organic Materials Review Institute's website.

2 comments:

  1. Oh my, I'm so jealous! Look at all of those amazing foods to be! We're in the city and I just started a very small container garden. It's OK, but I want that!

    Thanks for visiting my blog & entering my giveaway. Your blog is awesome, and I'm now a new follower!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, Nancy! Your farm wedding venue looks amazing. I also love that you're a knitter & a Nancy - so is my mom, and I always joke that she's my only reader. Would you be interested in working together on a container gardening post?

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