Powdery mildew! :(

ok thanks camp!!

i printed off the reciepe for the spray

hugs

rose

I've had PM for weeks now, I've tried Milk spray and Neem spray and nothing seems to help it just keeps getting worse.
I've had to pull up most of my squash plants and now it's starting on my giant pumpkins, I only have 2 giants left so I'll most definitely will cry if I can't get it under control! I've changed my watering schedule and have been letting the affected plants go dry but I think it might be the humid weather adding to the problem and maybe not the watering???
I've been spraying on a three day schedule using the milk spray for the first week and now the neem.
My veggie plants have grown huge this year (I have bush squash plants taller than me)so this might also be adding to the problem? I never imagined being lucky enough to have a super prosperous garden could lead to such a mess.
Any suggestions?

It is indeed the humidity and not the watering that promotes the powdery & downy mildew. Do give the baking soda spray a try. Dont forhet to spray the undersides of the leaves and prune out any mildew effected leaves. The plant will put out new growth, if it is not too far gone.

I all else fails and you still have plants, bring out the big gun - copper fungicide. Worked great on my tomato blight and is indicated for PM. It is considered organic.

Kay

walshevak wrote:I all else fails and you still have plants, bring out the big gun - copper fungicide. Worked great on my tomato blight and is indicated for PM. It is considered organic.

Kay

The humidity and dew points are incredibly high here in NH right now. I am probably going to spray with copper again tomorrow.... Trying to avoid the dreaded blight.

No sign of PM yet. Fingers crossed for none.

Our humidity is about as hi as it gets and I have PM everywhere. I cut off ALOT of leaves from zucchini, spag squash, melon and cucumbers. I'm spraying backs and fronts of all the leaves with baking soda solution - 1 tsp to 1 qt water w/ a couple drops of dish soap. It's still spreading but I've only done it for 2 days now.

The battle continues and I SHALL BE VICTORIOUS! (and if not I know where the grocery store is )

CC

CC spray it especially on the new growth that has limited symptoms. You don't need to do it every day, unless it rains. Good luck.

I've been very fortunate this year with PM. I've only seen a few small spots on my three zucs, four pumpkins, and four melons. My peas were simply covered top to bottom though, and it actually eventually killed them! I guess there's always fall peas.

A good write up about Powdery mildew. It discusses the importance of baking soda and if used improperly can harm the plant and soil.

Apparently I have powdery mildew on my pumpkin plants, squash plants and zucchini plant. Fortunately, the squash plants have produced so far 2 squashes and the zucchini has been producing lots of veg's. Unfortunately, my pumpkin plants are having trouble pollinating since I still don't have any female flowers. I wonder if the powdery mildew is the cause of this issue. Anyway tonight I went and purchased Ortho Elementals garden disease control which is organic and I plan on spraying it onto the squash, pumpkin and zucchini plants tom in the am. I can only hope it is not too late. I am going away again to visit my new grandson and plan to return on Fri. I have a few questions:
1) How quickly does the spray work to get rid of the powdery mildew? It did state to apply every 7 days.
2) Also, would it be worth my while to just pull out all of the pumpkin plants, destroy, put new compost in and then replace the box with new pumpkin seeds?
Any advice is appreciated.
P.S. This is the 1st time I every had trouble growing pumpkins and I am truly bummed about it!

So, it appears I, too, have gotten PM on my cucumber plant. I looked at it yesterday and all seemed fine. Today I noticed the white spots on it. How could all of that have happened overnight?!?!

So I have read up on it via a few threads and posted links. I understand I should buy some Neem oil and spray it on both sides of all the leaves once per week. What do you use for the sprayer and where do you get it? Or do I just empty out a bottle of Windex and use that?

Clean, empty spray bottles can be had at just about any grocer or Walmart/big box store for not much more than a buck$.

Do I spray the soil also? Some of the reading I did said PM affects the soil as well as the leaves. Somehow spraying oil on the soil doesn't seem right to me.

I would encourage you to remove the affected leaves with pruning shears, spray water on the plants tonight and then spray with neem tomorrow when they are dry. The humidity and high temps have subsided for now and this will also limit powdery mildew.

camprn wrote:I would encourage you to remove the affected leaves with pruning shears, spray water on the plants tonight and then spray with neem tomorrow when they are dry. The humidity and high temps have subsided for now and this will also limit powdery mildew.

OH! I already sprayed the leaves with Neem today, late afternoon. I had wanted to do it earlier but something I ate at lunch didn't agree with me so had to hold off driving to get the Neem. I also cut off five affected leaves. There were a couple other leaves with just a couple spots on it. Somehow with the reading I did, it seemed that I could liberally spray those leaves and keep them on. I guess if they look like PM tomorrow I will clip them off too. Kind of concerned because there are not *that* many leaves on the plants. But I could not decide if I should spray the soil, so I did not.

Please keep us updated on this, cpl100, if you don't mind. I seem to be losing my battle but I have used Neem yet.

1 plant down,4 to go...

CC

I've been away for a week and when I got home yesterday I noticed my peas look really bad, pretty sure it's PM. It seems to have spread to my carrots as well, they are in the same bed. Going to see what I can get down the shops shortly to treat it but I think I might have to rip the peas out as they are pretty badly affected.

Don't forget to clean your pruners! You don't want to spread it!

Haven't used the pruners on it yet, I got some eco-fungicide and nearly drowned the plants that were worst affected. Gave everything else in that bed a spray as a few other things weren't looking too good and then sprayed some things in another bed that I wasn't sure about, just in case!

I will give it a few days and see what happens, if the peas don't come good then I'll rip them out.

I've had good results with using a diluted milk spray on PM-affected plants. The PM was really bad this year on our volunteer pumpkin plant but as long as I was able to give the plant a good milk shower every couple of days, the PM seemed to retreat. We weren't able to completely eradicate it, but it didn't seem to affect the plant nor the 'kins.

This article is where we learned about the milk spray for PM but has other interesting info as well.

As to application, we started out using a hand-held squirty bottle to apply but it leaked & the constant squeezing started hurting my hands, so I remembered that I had one of those gallon-size pump-type sprayers sitting in the garage unused. I mixed the milk in that & whatever was left over, I refrigerated & used the next time. I have no idea if it matters to the effectiveness if the milk is sour or not, but I didn't fancy spraying sour milk on the plants (& myself), so I stuck it in the fridge & it seemed to work OK.

I have good results with the backing soda spray, which needs repeating usually about every week.

Thanks guys, will look into those a bit more, probably use the baking soda one in the future but my peas were so bad I figured it needed drastic action, so organic fungicide was the way to go for now.

LOL, I meant baking soda, of course....

Lol, I didn't even notice the typo, I was too busy trying to remember whether baking soda was bi-carb or baking powder as we call things by different names here.

I think baking soda is bicarbonate of soda. Baking powder has cream of tartar in it.