Hi everyone, this is Noelle from Petitti Garden Centers. We're off-site in a
beautiful vegetable garden and I just wanted to show you a couple things that
have been happening in the garden that you may or may not know about. Today
we're gonna focus on looking at powdery mildew and you can see this is a
beautiful zucchini plant that's grown up and they are very, very prevalent to
white, you know, kind of fuzzy looking, powdery mildew disease. Okay, the best
thing that we and what we normally talk about is we talk about oh you have
powdery mildew you go ahead and you take a copper fungicide spray which is very
safe to use out in the garden. It is considered to be a natural curative for
powdery mildew and other diseases and you go ahead and spray it. But before I
do that I wanted to talk to you a little bit about other things you could do
culturally, to reduce powdery mildew. So, one of the things is when you're
planting your plants and the springtime make sure you give them enough space. So,
zucchini plants can get very very large, can grow very quickly and so giving them
space to let air flow through them is really, really important. The other thing
that you can do is try to keep your garden weed-free and this garden is
beautiful it is absolutely weed-free, but what happens is that the weeds can also
reduce the actual overall health of your plant material. They can bring in pests
and so sometimes disease can increase because those weeds are around, so make
sure your weeding as often as possible as well. Another thing that we like to
talk about is watering. When you water you, want to water in the mornings if you
can. Water deeply and thoroughly. I've talked about this before, where you want
to make sure that root system of the plant is moving down into the soil as
best you can, okay. Now, for spring copper fungicide there's
many many products that are copper soap based. So, whatever you know, product works
for you best or whatever you're available to find, do look at the active
ingredient. So usually on the label it'll tell you
the percentage of the copper soap that's active in this, so look for your best
percentage, okay. When you spray your copper fungicides or copper soaps what
you're gonna find is they actually you want to do it about once every 7 to 10
days there's a kind of window right in there and normally when I spray I try
not to spray during the heat of the day when there's a lot of Sun a lot of heat.
I'll try to do it in the evening and cover that plant material, okay. The other
thing that you need to know about any fungicide, it doesn't matter if it's
copper, it could be Funginil, it could be a lot of different types of fungal
controls what you need to know is they're always better as a preventative
then they are as a curative. Yes, they will reduce powdery mildew in the garden
no problem whatsoever. However, if you can catch it a little bit earlier, knowing
that your zucchini is probably gonna get powdery mildew because usually it does,
try to spray that plant material about a week or two before you start seeing that
type of disease occur. So, that's why it's nice to keep a garden calendar, keep
notes from year-to-year so you see, oh my gosh the powdery mildew is gonna come up
on the zucchini in a week, that means I'm gonna spray it now before it even starts.
Okay, so we're gonna start spraying this and what you need to know about spraying
fungicides is that you want to cover the top and the bottom of the plant so
you're gonna hit and you're gonna do a liberal spraying all through the plant.
Make sure you're covering both services that's really important that's important
for fungal disease and also the stems too because, you'll notice on zucchini
stems can get quite a bit of disease on them too
and then once you're finished that's fine go ahead and let it dry on again
you have that 7-10 day window if it rains by chance, guess what, you kind of
wash everything off and you've got to start over again.
You're gonna start that spray again and then you have that seven to ten-day
window before you need to spray as well okay so that's basically powdery mildew
on zucchini using a copper fungicide very very easy to use very safe to use
in the garden. Enjoy!