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This has started creeping up almost all my plants from the bottom up. I've cut away the bad leaves now, but I jsut need to know if Daconil is going to work...

[img]https://gallery.me.com/david.whitley/100077/Tomato2/web.jpg[/img]

and

[img]https://gallery.me.com/david.whitley/100077/Tomato1/web.jpg[/img]

Yeah, early blight for sure...do you use a mulch under your tomatoes at all Dave? That can help a lot with the splash up diseases, as can watering in the AM rather than at night...

[url=https://www.engageagro.com/media/pdf/msds/daconilultrex_msds_english.pdf]Daconil[/url]? On a food crop? Read that MSDS, Dave. Possible carcinogen, [url=https://www.engageagro.com/media/pdf/msds/daconilultrex_msds_english.pdf]low level toxicity[/url] for humans...ewww...the Extoxnet page says it stays persistent in plants and some metabolites do make it to harvested fruit... and we haven't even begun to talk about what it does to the environment... I can't tell you what to do, Dave, but I can ask, please don't go there... we just got you here...

I have harvested good fruit off of plants blasted with early blight; you can help them through this but not by killing every fungus in a ten foot area, including mycorrhizal fungii supporting your tomato's root sysytem, or the Trichoderma fungus that has been killing a lot of other fungii that didn't end up attacking your plant. You need those guys.

Mix milk to water, one to ten, and add a splash of fish hydrolysate, and water leaves with it after every rain or foliage wetting. This encourages Lactobacillus bacteria that have low level antifungal properties to colonize the leaf surfaces, called antagonistic biological counterculture, and no matter what you call it it sure does help with early blight. Also the calcium in the milk is very important here as well; seems calcium deficiency in plants is a key factor in early blight. Liming the soil will help next year, but milk gets it into the plant much quicker than a mineralized form.

Spread some good mulch under your tomatoes to keep water borne disease from splashing up. And develop good live soil ecologies that inhibit badguys, who are only 5% of the total biology mix in a healthy environment. Neem oil has proven somewhat effective, but only when caught early, and that does not seem to be the case here...

I prune off the lower foliage as soon as plants are big enough to allow; by the time they are three footers the bottom foot of foliage has been sheared off, and with everything above, I stay pretty clean. But I had a plant or two hit hard last year and eked them along until the fruit ripened; you can do this. Keep pruning off the dead as soon as you see it going and treat them like I said and you'll get through this...

HG

Dave - good luck with your tomatoes, hope for the better!

The Helpful Gardener wrote:
Mix milk to water, one to ten, and add a splash of fish hydrolysate, and water leaves with it after every rain or foliage wetting. This encourages Lactobacillus bacteria that have low level antifungal properties to colonize the leaf surfaces, called antagonistic biological counterculture, and no matter what you call it it sure does help with early blight. Also the calcium in the milk is very important here as well; seems calcium deficiency in plants is a key factor in early blight. ...

HG

Scott - can this mix be use as a "preventative" measure? And if so, how often?

Regards,
D

Absolutely and you can't really do it too much... after rain because you wash a good deal of last times calcium off (not so much the bacteria, as bacteria produces a sugary glue to stick itself, but still some are lost).

You know how yogurt won't go bad, because it already has a bacterial culture? Exact same idea. Exact same bacteria, to be specific...Nature always wants to balance itself; it does not like dominant culture of any being and usually sends something along to counter it. Disease is a dominant culture, and Nature provides some very good tools to fight it. We just need to be careful about everybody in the food chain; we have failed to do that with too many creatures and our understanding of operating ecosystems is so poor we cannot sustain one of our own making for more than a few months. ([url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere2#Criticism]Biosphere 2[/url] was inspired, but it shows just how clueless we are in thinking we can manipulate ecosystems and make it work out without taking the least among us into account. They forgot the soil biology, and they hadn't allowed enough plant material to balance that oxygen use (they are tiny but they are many). We forget soil biology at our peril...

HG

Can you put that milk and water stuff in a spray bottle? I also have problems with blight but it sounds like a major pain to wet the leaves with it without a spray bottle.

Of course!

You CAN do it a mouthful at a time (the human mouth is LOADED with Lactobacillus!), but mixing the milk and water is difficult, what with a staw in EITHER nostril like that...a paintbrush is thorough, but time consuming...

No I'd go with the spray bottle...

HG

Thanks for the help! The temps have gotten a lot warmer here and after cutting off the bad leaves I seem to be out of the woods. I did use daconil so forgive me!

Dave, don't apologize to me, no need. We all make our choices; I just try to help people make choices with all the information at hand, and I just worry about what it will do to folks to be eating that stuff. But you are doing this to yourself; if you feel a need to apologize, try a mirror...

Next year armed with more info and better garden hygiene, you can avoid this altogether; the very best form of disease control... Live and learn...

HG

Acidophilus for my tomatoes? How cool is that?