Country Living Skills

After all the leaves had been pruned away from our infected zucchini, new leaves grew quickly, but the fruit that was already growing seemed to disappear…  So we pruned away all the whithered and moldy fruit too, and continued spraying leaves and stems with baking soda / soap mix, and this morning we harvested the first nice proper zucchini.  Looks like for us, the baking soda / soap mix saved the plants.

Here is the recipe again, for 1 gallon of water:

• 4 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp soap (we used dish liquid)

Well, the baking soda/ soap mix has a drawback after all: It covers the plant leaves with seasoning for the deer who hitherto were uninterested in our vegetables and rather ate the young maple leaves.

Especially the cucumbers must have been a delicious addition to family deer’s diet for when we inspected our garden this morning, several of our cucumber plants were completely leafless, in others the foliage was a little less severely decimated.

So tonight we put up a deer fence of our own making: We hung a few sheets of plastic (an old shower curtain cut in two, to be precise) in front of the cucumber bed and in front of that we drew another line of string and fastened tin foil to it to further deter our nightly visitors.

Really, as nice as it is to live in a place where you can watch all kinds of wildlife from your living room window, you’d rather not want them in your yard, be it deer, raccoon, or even rabbits, especially when you need to rely on your garden or when you practice for ‘gardening when it counts’.

After a pause yesterday I sprayed again today and am pleased with the result…

I know you should not count your chickens before they are hatched, but it looks as if the zucchini and all the other infected plants are doing really good now !  No new mildew, but plenty of new foliage growth, and the fruits are growing too, so…  I dare say the baking soda / soap mix, and the pruning, worked.  Stay tuned for more though, we will report how things are developing.

After heavy pruning and spraying yesterday, our zucchini looked much better this morning.  There seems to be plenty of new foliage growth already, and the few leaves that still had a little mildew on them don’t seem to have developed any more mildew on them this morning.

The acorn squash that looked really bad last night seems to have recovered a little too.This morning I sprayed them all again with the baking soda/ soap mixture as it seems to work well.

Stay tuned for how things are continuing here.  Tonight we will burn the leaves I pruned away yesterday morning.

We started fighting the powdery mildew not last night, but this morning since we read online that watering and/ or fertilizing plants in the evening could be one of the reasons why they get powdery mildew in the first place. Not only did we find affected leaves on zucchini and pumpkins, but also on the acorn squash and on our cucumbers. The luffa gourd that grows right next t the zucchini remained unaffected, which came as a surprise.

So this morning we first cut away all the infected leaves and then sprayed the baking soda/ soap mixture on the remaining leaves and the stems, and now we are waiting for the results.

We also read online that a mixture of 1 part of water and 9 parts of milk would work well against powdery mildew, but we decided to try the baking soda/ soap mix first.