Easy Gardening Tips
Baking soda and water is often all we is need to treat mildew in the garden. Trouble is it’s so easy to forget or misplace the recipe. So if that should happen to you this recipe it will be archived on this site.
Mix together:
1 tablespoon baking soda (from the kitchen cupboard) 1/2 teaspoon liquid soap 1 tablespoon horticultural oil 1 gallon of water
Mix together and apply from a clean sprayer. The baking soda counteracts the fungi by changing the pH of the leaves, the soap helps it spread, and the oil coats the fungal spores and keeps then from growing. In a pinch, I’ve used a clear kitchen oil like canola or grapeseed as they too will smother but the lightweight hort oil is best. If you have plants you’ve not treated with this spray before start out on a small section. Plants should be well watered befoe applying and don’t apply in heavy sun. For many plants this might mean watering well in the morning and then in late afternoon/early evening come back and spray well hydrated plants when they are not in direct sun. I like to discard unused mixture after one or two days and then mix up a fresh batch. When these measures don’t seem adequate for fungal or mildew problems I apply Serenade, a commercially available and OMRI approved organic product.
Filed under: Easy Gardening Tips, Gardening, Greetings From The Garden, Recipes, garden, herb gardens | Tagged: plant diseases
Thanks, this is a recipe I will need in the comming summer. Someone mentioned baking soda to me, but I never had a recipe, thus never tried it yet.
Rose Marie, I use milk for fungal infections such as powdery mildew, botrytis, early and late blights. 40 to 50% milk mixed with water and applied to foliage works quite well. Richness of the milk is not crucial; skim milk or even powdered skim work well. I understand that Brazilian scientists discovered this cure, but so far official recognition is limited to the Netherlands. The USDA tested it, as I recall, and found it as effective as commercial preparations.