|
Watching healthy plants get sick and die is a very depressing sight to a gardener. Plant diseases are always out there, waiting to attack your garden. While sonic diseases are easily treated, other more serious diseases will require repeat treatments to handle. Some diseases are so serious (tobacco mosaic virus for example), that the plant is doomed. Plant diseases can seriously lower crop production, even if the sick plants recover. Lets keep diseases out of our gardens! Here's how: Good Growing Conditions and Practices: The best defence against plant disease is to keep your plants healthy and actively growing, by creating good conditions in your garden. Attention to temperature, air movement and air change, proper spacing of plants, consistent growing conditions - all these practices ensure healthy, stress-free plants that can resist bugs and disease well. Often, bugs and disease will attack a weak plant in your garden and build up armies to invade the rest of your healthy plants! Sanitization: Use Healthy Plant Stock - a cutting from a sick plant will carry on the disease in the new plant.
- some varieties of a plant will have greater natural resistance to disease than their "weak sisters"; if possible, grow only varieties that have known disease resistance.
Keep Tools, Hands and Clothing Clean - diseases, pests and insect eggs can travel to new host plants
- during pruning, transplanting and handling; wash your hands after handling diseased plants before you touch a healthy one
- clean tools and knives well after use
- keep garden clear of dead leaves
Sterilize Garden or other Grow Mediums
(a Medium is what your roots are growing in) - this is especially important when using garden dirt from the backyard in a container indoors or when using recycled rockwool or lava rock for new crops
- the soil-less potting mixes and new rockwool are considered clean already - no further treatment is needed
Use R/O Water or Distilled Note: Peroxide helps plants to take up food easier and quicker, so this treatment has an extra benefit to the garden. Watch your garden for problems and treat them promptly! You may eliminate the disease entirely, before it gains a foothold in your garden.
Treating Fungus and Bacteria in Your Garden
Seedlings and Newly Rooted Cuttings - treat with No-Damp or other mild fungicide
- be sure roots are already wet before root-drench treatment: No-Damp contains alcohol that could damage dry roots or unrooted cuttings
- treat plants once a week until plants recover
Vigorous Plants - Green Growth (no flowers or crop on plant) - spray top-growth well with Safers Garden Fungicide
- wet all leaves until liquid runs off leaves
" Caution " - Do not spray plants with flowers or crop on them; you will definitely burn your crop!
- treat your plants once a week - the best time to spray is late in the day, so the plants can dry in the dark; avoid spraying in strong light.
Flowering or Crop Plants
- treat plants by hand-watering Benomyl fungicide into the roots
" Caution " - Never spray a flowering plant with fungicide; it could damage the flower or crop!
- water enough Benomyl solution into the roots to drench the entire root system
- treat the plants when the roots are already wet from feeding or watering, and when they won't be watered again for at least a few hours
- treat once a week
Hints on Treating Plants for Disease
- avoid high temperature and strong fertilizers until plants recover
- disease can become tolerant of a fungicide if used many times; after you have used one product three or four times in a row, switch to another suitable product and attack the disease with a new weapon.
Safers Garden Fungicide is a sulphur based product only for spraying Green Growth. Do not use Safers Garden Fungicide for crop plants!
|
FAQs 
