Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and i want you to get it out of your head
that "spray" is a four letter word having spent so many years at the farmers markets
saying something like "no spray" is almost mandatory it's something you have to say to your customers
and in fact they take it so seriously i remember on one occasion that a customer came to me so
upset that he'd spoken to the apple vendor and the apple vendor had confessed that he'd done some
spraying and after it was all done i'd consoled him a little i went over and talked to the
apple vendor and said what are you spraying with that upset him so badly and he said well it's a
mix of kelp meal neem oil and molasses that i've been using with good results now i have
no idea whether that mix works well on apples as a holistic remedy but clearly nothing in there is
a is a health risk or a problem so spray is just a method of application really what you should
be looking at is what are you putting into the spray and is it appropriate does it promote the
health of the plant or the health of the fruit or the vegetable without causing impacts to the
healthiness of the food or the or adding chemicals to your customer's diet or
garden so that's what i want to talk about today is a spray that i'm using with some success i've
been using and i've told you before on this that i use potassium bicarbonate which is just basic
baking soda it's a potassium salt that seems to stimulate an immune response in your plants
towards fungal pathogens particularly in my case i'm talking about black spot and powdery
mildew although i will link a couple of studies here below the first of which we'll talk about
and in this case he used tomatoes how it worked against a wide range of pathogens fusarium and
other things so you know the results of this are well proven and the harms are negligible it really
is a short-lived low residue no harm product now i do have a secret ingredient that i've added to
that and it may be one that you've never heard before this one is called chitosan. Now chitosan
is another bio-pesticide this one is made from the sugars in shellfish shells and it
boosts the effectiveness of these potassium salts either potassium bicarbonate or potassium sorbate
both of which i intend to use this year and it can boost them from an efficacy of reducing
say powdery mildew in the one study that i saw the the alone the potassium bicarbonate might
drop it by about 50 percent with this added to the mix it uh was proven to reduce it up to 70 or 80
in one application and more with with multiple applications it does give you some idea of how
i evaluate supplements like these you hear about all sorts of wonder supplements things you can add
or use and you know they'll cure everything or cure all but you really have to wait for
the science to come in and look up those sources okay i'm going to use my handy dandy cart sprayer
that you see behind me here i hope you can see it behind me here and in this video i'm
going to show you how to mix this and how to apply this and why i'm applying it to my roses
i'm going to start with the y here and particularly why i'm spraying
sort of mid-winter here you can see that a lot of my roses held their foliage into the winter but we
had a cold snap and what you can see in these leaves i'm going to try to focus on some here
that have kind of an olivey looking color brownish starting to sense that's because they got hit by
that cold temperature and those are in the process of dropping you can see also that there's lots of
flowers that were held on these over the winter and that's prime material for fungal pathogens
to move in things like botrytis and other rot organisms what i can also see on this one over
here i'm going to give it a second to focus is that i see signs on here of powdery mildew
and that's a cool season kind of a pathogen as well or at least a moist season pathogen
and i really don't want that to carry over on these plants into the spring so what
i'll be doing with these to some degrees i'll be defoliating them but i also want to combine that
with spraying and spraying to prevent a wide range of pathogens like that botrytis i mentioned and
like that powdery mildew from spreading as they put on new growth going into the spring
if you're curious this is a heated bench setup indoors that i'm setting up for my seedlings
that video will be coming but i wanted to show you with these ingredients here for my spray i may as
well spill all of my secrets here if you don't need to get these at the horticulture store at
40 pound bags what you can do is you can go to the wine making suppliers both chitosan and potassium
bicarbonate and in fact potassium sorbate which i mentioned as well in this video and will be
in that study all three of those are common in wine making and they sell them in smaller sizes
that would be useful for home gardeners so here on the left is the chidosan powder
and here on the right is the potassium bicarbonate both purchased from wine making suppliers now the
ingredients on this and i have to admit this is far far easier in metric than in imperial 0.75
grams per liter of chitosan in weight per volume and in the potassium bicarbonate
that's 3.0 grams per liter okay let me show you what that looks like in real life
what i'm mixing is a water solution my sprayer i'm mixing up 20 liters so that works out that
i need uh if i'm doing 0.75 grams per liter it turns out that i need 15 grams of the chitosan
so i'm just going to keep on scooping from the bag here until i see the scale says 15 grams
and that that should do it as for the potassium bicarbonate i'm mixing it at
3 grams per liter so what i actually need is 60 grams so
i may as well just start pouring
and i went a tiny bit over there but that should be fine so it's really tricky trying to work this
out to a teaspoons per gallon because this one is so much fluffier than this one here so even though
the grams per liter measurements on this is much much lower what it worked out to just in rough
numbers is you had to put in about a heaping teaspoon of chia and about two teaspoons of
the baking soda to get one gallon of solution that's what it kind of worked out too for me
obviously far more accurate doing it in grams per liter and weighing it into your solution
well i have the hose here filling the tank sprayer with water up to the 20 liter mark i'm
going to include the dry ingredients while it's mixing happily both of these the chitosan and the
potassium bicarbonate dissolve readily in water so it shouldn't be too hard to keep them mixed up
and i've put just a drop of surfactant in there to help spread and stick the spray you could use
a drop of dish soap and replacement at home but i've used professional type of surfactant
all right just going to fill that up to 20 liters then we'll start spraying this portable sprayer by
the way is super handy for me it just hooks up to a regular car battery which i have an extra
one over here that it's hooked onto i turn it on and it creates the pressure for my spraying so i
can do a fairly large volume of spraying without having to use a backpack sprayer or pump things
very handy for me and it mounted really nicely onto one of my gorilla carts so i can just take it
to where i need it even out in the field with my roses or to each and every one of the greenhouses
this sprayer provides for a nice fine spray so you can see that i move up and down and around
the entire canopy trying to get the tops and the bottoms of the leaves the point i'm spraying to
is the point of runoff so you should have enough liquid on the leaves so it's dripping down into
the soil below it that's when you know you have enough liquid on there now you'll also notice that
i'm not wearing any ventilator any eye protection or any gloves that's because these ingredients are
not harmful to humans in the amounts that i've mixed them so i there's no risk to me
and i wouldn't use something on my farm that's such a harsh chemical that it requires protection
or i felt was a risk to my family all right thanks so much for watching today and if you
have any questions about this or other topics related to spring or pest control
please drop those into the comments below the video and i'll see what i can do to help