How We Prevent Powdery Mildew on Our Squash and Cucumbers

as the bag says one bag countless uses in today's episode i'm gonna give you one more of those countless uses so let's go what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my gardener channel it is a beautiful late summer day early fall day however you want to look at it it started out like fall and it's kind of finishing like summer i am so happy to be out in the garden today and i'm really excited to talk about something that a lot of you asked me about and that was our fall cucumbers so about four weeks ago or so we started from seed our fall cucumbers they're behind me here and they're growing very nicely in fact they're flowering and starting to fruit but a lot of you asked how i grew them and kept them disease free because true if you just threw the seeds in the ground same thing with zucchinis or you know any type of summer squash if you threw those seeds in the ground inevitably with the cold nights and the the damp weather that you get in fall you will definitely encounter things like powdery mildew so to combat the powdery mildew i wanted to show you what we do to keep them powdery mildew free now it's not a guaranteed way to keep them powdery mildew free but it's a very good preventative and my approach is be preventative rather than reactive right so i would rather i would rather prevent them and and do things slowly and methodically in the garden than to come out one day have a huge outbreak and then have to react because then you're already behind the you're already kind of behind the curve you already have to play catch-up to get in front of the outbreak and so i'd much rather take a preventative approach all right so before we get started with preventative measures for powdery mildew i wanted to share with you a few facts and misconceptions about powdery mildew that you might not already know so when it comes to powdery mildew it is a soil borne fungus that means it's found in the soil and colonizes the leaf surface which then can actually use the wind to spread its spores to other soil so because the fact that it's found in the soil it's a common misconception that a lot of gardeners will think that they've either gotten tainted soil from an outside source and they want to blame like a landscaping company or they uh they use their soil as an excuse for why they have it and why they should have gone with an outside source right like oh i should have bought new soil because i knew i couldn't trust the soil that i had or you go with an outside source as i you know i knew i should have just used the soil that i had because now i went with an outside source and i got tainted soil right it is a lose-lose proposition and a lot of gardeners play the blame game and unfortunately that just ends up taking you down a path that is really going to be a dead end because because of the fact that powdery mildew is a soil borne fungus it is found in literally every single soil anywhere you look that leads to the second misconception is that a lot of gardeners say okay well if i compost plant material that has had powdery mildew in the past in my compost pile those spores will then colonize my compost which will then basically you know taint all of my soil when in fact all of your soil is already tainted anyways and so it's more about the growing conditions that the plants are being put under than the actual soil itself you'll find powdery mildew spores in literally any soil but it's about the growing conditions that you're growing these crops that allows the uh that allows the powdery mildew to proliferate and so that leads me to the point of today's episode which is just preventing it you can prevent it on the surface of your leaves still while having it present in your soil the two can co-exist right your plants can coexist powdery mildew free because of your actions still while having powdery mildew in the soil so powdery mildew is a fungus that colonizes leaves but only if the leaf surface is the correct ph mildews and molds are very prone to ph imbalances and so if you can swing the ph higher or lower from where it needs to colonize you can actually actively control it very simply and so what we're going to be using is we're going to be using baking soda which will inevitably change the ph of the surface of the leaf to be slightly alkaline and what that will do is that will actually change the ph of the leaf surface as long as this is found on the leaf it will actually change the ph of the leaf surface not so much that the plant will die but enough that the powdery mildew can't survive or can't even colonize at all and so we will do this every single week we'll talk about this later but we'll do this every single week so that we ensure that the leaf surface is always at a ph that cannot host powdery mildew we will do this basically starting as early as possible from the moment that the adult leaves have formed on our cucumber plants and our squash plants we will start spraying we do this basically as long as the plant is alive and that's because any time you let your guard down the leaf surface ph can change because of you know dew landing on the leaf and washing off the baking soda solution or rain coming and washing off the baking soda solution and so because of that you need to regularly apply this it may seem like a lot of work but the alternative is that you get it and it takes out your plant and then you don't get anything so i prefer to put in a little bit of work because it's very very simple and once you make the spray up it can stay in a spray bottle it doesn't go bad and you can just keep using it you know as long as you need it so i prefer to make up a one gallon jug of it this is a big jug but i only use i only make about a gallon of it and so i've got a gallon of water in here then i take one tablespoon of baking soda just one tablespoon i put that into the container you don't want to use more than a tablespoon because if you are using this as a preventative measure you want to make sure it's very gentle if you already have powdery mildew you can go up to two tablespoons but just be aware that the more you change the ph the higher the chance of actually stressing out the plant and ending up killing it so you want to be very gentle when you're preventing it right we're not taking a drastic approach we're taking a very gentle approach so we have one tablespoon of baking soda and then the secret is a couple drops of dish soap i just used dawn dish soap that's what we got on hand but i take a couple drops and what that does is allows the it allows the uh the baking soda solution to stick onto the surface of the leaf a little bit longer all right so we went back we sprayed the surface of all the leaves it's really important to realize you don't need to spray the undersides of the leaves powdery mildew does not colonize the underside it only colonizes the top and one of the problems that a lot of gardeners face when spraying powdery when controlling powdery mildew is that they spray the wrong time of the day it is very very important you spray before the heat of the day it's about 9 30 in the morning right now and so the sun has just come up only about like an hour and a half ago or so and uh and we're well before the heat of the day that's going to allow the leaves to dry before the before the heat of the day because if it gets hot and the sun comes out you're actually going to end up risking burning your leaves and that can actually kill them so even if it's gentle like this it's always best to spray in early morning when possible and then also a lot of gardeners will think that they have to follow up like every single day every other day it's not something you really should do because you're gonna end up over concentrating and over spraying it's best to actually spray only about once a week now you can increase the concentration but still only spray once a week if you find that the spray is ineffective or you're starting to see some powdery mildew and you're still using the one tablespoon bump it up to like one and a half tablespoons and see what happens bump it up to two and see what happens you really shouldn't and in most cases you really can't go higher than two tablespoons to a gallon of water because then you're gonna start entering the level that's gonna start killing the plants so it's just one of those things where again you can prevent it you can you can take these steps to actually control it but sometimes even those steps aren't good enough and so at that point that's really where you say look what can i do better next year can i plant them at a different time next year was the season just a weird season was it really wet and really cold when normally it would have been really warm and really dry you know those things are things you have to ask yourself because at a certain point us as organic gardeners can only do what we can do we can only do what's at our disposal and that's those are the things you really start have to start asking yourself if this is not working but uh but again powdery mildew is not something you can control completely it's not something you can completely eradicate it's really just about kind of mitigating and keeping your uh keeping your plants in check keeping the powdery mildew off of the leaves as much as possible for as long as possible and if you do this i think you're going to have great success in the garden so when it comes to spraying things like copper fungicide and milk milk can leave a smelly residue when it dries on your plants and copper fungicide can be fairly expensive i use baking soda because it's just as effective but everybody has it it's super accessible and very inexpensive so i just prefer to use this but use what you feel that you trust as long as it is changing the ph of the surface of the leaf that's really all you're going for so i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new if you did make sure to throw a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already we have lots more videos coming out despite the fact the weather's cooling down our videos are just heating up so all right we'll talk to you guys later as always this is luke from the mi gardener channel reminding you to grow big or go home i'll catch you guys later bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 93,431

Keywords: Premiere_Elements_2018, baking soda, cucumber, garden tip, gardening tip, guide, how to, how we, how-to, howto, mi gardener, migardener, mildew, mold, organic gardening, powdery mildew, prevent, pumpkin, simple, squash, tips, tutorial, walkthrough, zucchini

Id: 0m-0KBoE9sw

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022