Using Hydrogen Peroxide on Anthracnose & Other Cucumber Fungus Issues: How to Create a Spray Routine

welcome to the rusted garden homestead so my cucumber plants have a fungal issue this is cucumber anthracnose probably fungal issues are typically classified as leaf spot diseases and you get these spots on there and it's brown rings within rings concentric rings and when you have that yellow halo that's a fungal issue it could be a leaf spot could be anthracnose they show up on all kinds of different plants different strains affect different plants however this cucumber plant has a fungal issue and it's everywhere and you can see that it probably started right over here came up from the ground or whatever worked its way up i got behind in my prevention spraying that's what i recommend most to really deal with these things if you're spraying your anti-fungals early and ahead of time they're going to look great and the plants did well for a while so what you want to do technically is to remove the damaged leaves bag them up throw them away don't compost them new growth should come out healthy and fine so we're going to spray all this get the fungal issues under control and everything new that's coming out will be green and it'll be good to go lots of cucumbers in there too so this plant is still producing but let's get to the spring i don't typically myself remove everything i'll remove a lot of the leaves but you don't have to be perfect with the removal because we're going to spray every leaf top and bottom and i'll show you the sprays that i'm using here's my first cucumber plant that i planted this has been growing strong since really the beginning of may now when you're looking at the leaf patterns you may get confused you won't know if it's anthracnose if it's a leaf spot if it's a downy mildew maybe it's insects chewing on the underside it's okay not to know exactly what is on there it's good practice to be able to identify the disease but on the internet on youtube there's all like people will look at this and call it different things you got your fungus you got your mildews you have your insects the treatment that i'm going to show you with hydrogen peroxide and then peppermint oil really works well to manage anything that comes up on cucumber plants so you may not be able to identify exactly what's going on but if your leaf doesn't look completely green something should be sprayed on there nine times out of ten i removed a lot of the cucumber leaves you don't have to get everyone that has the fungal issue on there the sprays that you're going to put on will control it i mean you could take them all off but you run into this issue so i'm in a pretty shady area those cucumbers aren't quite the size but you want to pick them if you remove a bunch of leaves and the sun is coming in and hitting them they no longer have the protect protection of the shade from the leaves they're going to start to white out on the skin and they're going to get sun scald so you do want to remove the cucumber plants i am cutting the leaves back so let's just find an example here's a leaf right here and you just go back to the vine pair scissors and you just snip it pretty close you don't need to worry about whether or not bugs are going to get in there insects are good to get in there you have a pretty beat up cucumber plant so remove a lot of the leaves and then we get to spraying so i'm going to use hydrogen peroxide spray i've been using it for years i'm comfortable with it i use eight ounces in one gallon of water i will link my tomato video that talks about hydrogen peroxide in there first thing is you need to test spray before you spray your entire garden with the new spray so i started hydrogen peroxide at four to six ounces per gallon of water i tested it out on cucumbers beans melons cantaloupe um all kinds of different plants and i've become comfortable using eight ounces per gallon again i would recommend starting with four to six ounces per gallon on your plants and kind of test it different things affect how effective or how damaging the sprays are elevation temperatures all kinds of different things so that's kind of on you so the first thing i'm going to do is use the hydrogen peroxide and these principles are the same h2o2 actually cleans and kills the fungus on the leaves so when you spray on the hydrogen peroxide it's actually cleaning the leaf the h2o2 breaks down into water and oxygen and that process messes up the fungus basically basically kills it off you can look up the science behind it but it's solid so when i spray the leaf i'm basically killing off the fungus h2o2 will be gone within 24 hours i want to do that first and then i'm going to come in with an anti-fungal like baking soda which changes the ph on the leaf and that will really slow and prevent the disease from spreading now you might say why don't i just use one or the other you can however i like to use the h2o2 to clean the leaves kill off the fungus i might even wait a day or two spray the hydrogen peroxide again and if things look under control i stop and i might not even put on the baking soda spray and you're gonna say well you know you just said to put it on there so the whole idea is figuring out what are the problems in your garden i have found in my garden i can do two or three rounds of hydrogen peroxide and it really stops the problem this is what happened then it got hot i was focusing on watering i didn't feel like coming out here um there was nothing on the leaves because the h202 goes away if i would had baking soda out here it would have just slowed this whole outbreak maybe even prevented it so i didn't put in that next level of anti-fungal and the baking soda will stay on here for as long as it doesn't rain when the rain comes you do have to reapply it but it sits on the leaves changes the ph level on the leaf makes it more alkaline and the fungus just finds it inhospitable it can't multiply it can't spread so you sort of have to have a plan in place but there are options on how you do prevention spraying and you stop fungal diseases on your cucumber plants so in this case h202 i'll show you how i do that here is my spray i use one container this is a gallon sprayer for my hydrogen peroxide and the answer is no you can't mix h2o2 with the baking soda and with other chemicals everything is a chemical organic or not they will react together so you just want clean h2o2 in here it's the three percent solution you buy at the grocery store pharmacy whatever but it should say three percent on there and you dilute it down to 48 ounces per gallon of water it works really well again test spray so first thing you want to do pick any of the larger cucumbers if you get hydrogen peroxide on stuff you can just rinse it off if you want and eat it i mean you can use it for an oral rinse you want to pick up any vine off the ground and just tuck it in somewhere so you can get underneath and spray so this is my routine i use h2o2 just about everywhere in my garden now you have to test spray you have to learn what works in your area because things can just vary i don't have a solid reason of why we can be in here spraying with an solution of eight ounces or one cup per gallon and then maybe it damages your garden you just have to test spray so you can see that i am really soaking down everything really well i'm covering the actual vines getting into the leaves covering the soil you're going to have leaves left behind this is not really an issue that you've got this problem because you left stuff on the ground these issues that if you have them are going to show up no matter what the whole key is really just this preventive spraying so i really want to spend time cleaning the bottom of these cucumber plants cleaning the soil of the surf cleaning the surface of the soil and that makes a really big difference a lot of these diseases start lower and work their way up and you get the idea that i'm going under each leaf spraying it well and soaking it down so here's my routine like i said i use h2o2 on most of my plants from this side i'm really trying to get all the undersides of the leaves so i may do this you know typically if i saw a couple of spots on here i'm going to go to a cucumber at the end of the video that has these problems starting to show up i'll talk a little bit more about this i will walk through my garden if i see my tomato plant has some spotting i'll hit it with the h2o2 that usually keeps things under control i don't have to go to the anti-fungals if i don't want to like baking soda even in saying that it's confusing so i want to just say this again h2o2 contacts kills goes away your other antifungals like baking soda stays on the leaf and it makes it inhospitable and you can choose either strategy or combination of both in some areas you may be able to just put down a baking soda spray top and bottom every 10 days 14 days and it works really well in other places it's just more humid more rainy more hot the baking soda spray is always getting washed off you don't want to be putting it on there all the time the h2o2 really cleans the leaves even before you may even see the spotting so you may want to do the h202 more often and forgo the baking soda spray or maybe you're in a place where you hit it with the h202 get it under control and then you can still spray with the baking soda spray and it's not that much work i know that wasn't the best explanation but every garden is different so you just have to figure out what works not just for the diseases but also what works for you if you're putting on baking soda spray you know two or three times a week because it just rains so much in your area or it's just so humid you know the humidity clings to the leaves and the baking soda spray or the anti-fungal drips off you may want to do more of the hydrogen peroxide best thing to do keep a journal and practice so i'm soaking the undersides of these leaves really well i'm going to wait two days just let this do its thing i'm going to hit it again with the hydrogen peroxide spray and then i will put the baking soda spray on there i'm not going to actually spray the baking soda spray because it's too early what i do is it's one to two tablespoons of baking soda in a gallon of water and then i coat the top and bottom leaves you want to spray in the morning it's 7 15 am right now you don't want to be spraying you know in the afternoon when it's 90 some degrees the leaves are wilting they're a little bit weaker then you also want to start with the one tablespoon of baking soda when it gets hot because sometimes a spray does really well on your plants when it's 70 80 degrees and then that same concentration when it's now in the 90s because the leaves wilt in the heat that spray damages your leaves so i wouldn't go with two tablespoons of baking soda right now in the heat i would just go with one tablespoon and you spray that uh one tablespoon per gallon and then you spray that every seven ten fourteen days depending on how much rain you have in some places people using overhead sprinkling which is fine but that's going to wash off the baking soda too so you just have to have a plan in place all right let's go over to that other plant and i'm going to finish up here and i'll talk about spring here's cucumber plant wave number three maybe four and you might get the idea that i plant my cucumbers in waves this is a completely green very healthy plant no signs of any problems on here at all no fungal issues no mildews no spider mites if you just want to use hydrogen peroxide you could do this as maintenance every seven days or so maybe longer when it's kind of the off season for the disease and what i mean by that is in july that's when the humidity goes up here in maryland that's when the problems come so when you have the problem times you spray more often but it's just really getting the undersides cleaning this with hydrogen peroxide if you don't want to use the hydrogen peroxide you'd be spraying the baking soda spray every seven to ten days and just making that leaf inhospitable um to the fungus so the fungus doesn't spread or attach when it rains you would have to replace it so the there's a lot of different strategies i wish i could just give you a set format for how often do do everything but our gardens are all over the world and we have different micro climates different diseases different problems so you just have to keep a journal and work out a plan that works for you here's my second wave of cucumbers and i just did a video on pruning these out the plant that you just saw was not pruned so when you have lots of leaves you have poor airflow the disease like i showed you can spread like wildfire so pruning makes a difference i will put that video um of the pruning in the video description so i removed a lot of the leaves already from the bottom you can see some of the spots are showing up on here so i'm just going to give it a spray you could remove those leaves if you want i'm going to start again at the bottom spray the vines get the surface and then i'm just going to start again spraying the underside and i would just cover everything i like to spray you know from one side over to the other and you just want to make sure that you're going to be cleaning the leaves off all right so i confused you thoroughly with the hydrogen peroxide in the baking soda there's another spray i use which is peppermint oil and that's you can find out on my channel too but it's one to two teaspoons in a gallon of water with one tablespoon of the castile type soaps which are the safest soaps if you're going to use a detergent soap you want to use one or two teaspoons and you put soap in there so that the oil disperses through the water so after a day or two goes by the hydrogen peroxide because my plants get spider mites on the undersides i have found that the peppermint oil really manages spider mites and that's a problem i get every year i don't think they're on here right now because i've been using the peppermint oil spray more so than the h202 but i'm going to hit them again day or two with the peppermint oil spray and that's really to spray on the undersides of the leaves and you can find all those recipes on my youtube channel so that's going to take care of the cucumber plant i believe with all the problems that are showing up now and this happens all the time in july in my area and if i could just follow my advice i'd be a little better at the prevention spraying and spraying on top of it but we all get tired we all get exhausted and you only have to miss a couple of days so finally after say we do all the spraying of the hydrogen peroxide you've removed a lot of leaves give your plant a gallon of water soluble fertilizer i use fish emulsion or agro thrive just spread out all around the base they're going to enjoy that extra nitrogen to create new leaves for you once that disease is under control so that extra nitrogen really helps out when you have to strip off a lot of the leaves of the plants watching please check out my seed shop at therestedgarden.com hydrogen peroxide cleans the leaves baking soda stays on the leaves makes it more difficult for the fungus to move across the plant thanks for watching

Channel: Gary Pilarchik (The Rusted Garden)

Views: 85,376

Keywords: Vegetable, Gardening, Organic, Homesteading, sustainable, off grid, Self-Sufficiency, Self Sufficient

Id: wgHhzxG2lhU

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022