The company that makes Probiotics 4 Plants Defensor Bacterial Inoculator told me they have temporarily taken their products off the market while they create a new marketing strategy for the general public. I suggest you use Serenade(r) Garden Disease Control instead. Serenade(r) is widely available in nurseries and it is fully organic. This is biological spray. Use it exactly according to instructions. It is more of a preventative than a cure.
The best defense is planting tomatoes in clean soil where tomatoes were never grown before. Also, keep the plants clean. Clip off all brown foliage before spraying with Serenade(r). With plants growing in the ground or raised beds, make sure you are watering deeply and infrequently instead of lightly and often. This encourages deep roots. Drip irrigation is not the best way to water tomatoes. When growing tomatoes in containers, however, it is necessary to water more frequently so they do not dry out. Regarding fertilizers, feed with an organic product especially recommended for tomatoes. For good health and disease resistance, tomatoes need nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium as well as trace minerals, especially magnesium.
Wet rainy weather early in the season has made disease problems proliferate more rapidly this year on tomatoes, particularly the heirloom types. For fewer disease problems, try growing modern hybrids which have been bred with resistance to diseases. Also from now on in future years don’t prune your tomato plants and begin spraying with Serenade earlier in the season as a preventative.
Related Articles:
- Controlling Early Blight on Tomatoes
- When to plant tomatoes for fall/early winter harvest
- Concentric rings on Tomatoes
- Tomatoes with too much foliage
- Problems with Beans and Tomatoes in 2010
I live in Point Loma and have been fighting mildew this season like never before.I treat all of my David Austin roses and my vegetable garden organically. Any secret to getting rid of the mildew on my zucchini leaves. I just keep chopping off the affected leaves.
Serenade® gets rid of mildew and is organic. It does a good job cleaning up mildew when applied at intervals of one week. Follow package directions. Another solution is to spray the leaves with an anti-transpirant, such as Moisturin 5. Though made of a polymer, Moisturin 5 is harmless to people or plants and creates a protective coat to shield plants from pests and diseases.
Next year plant mildew-resistant varieties of squash from seeds. Nursery transplants are usually not disease-resistant hybrids, and squash is easy to grow from seeds.
Disease-resistant roses fight off mildew. The best ones need no spraying even in coastal zones. Many people want to grow ‘Double Delight’ for example. It has a heavenly fragrance, but it always succumbs to mildew along the coast and sometimes even inland. Check the qualities and characteristics of David Austins when growing those, and plant the most disease-resistant ones. It goes without saying that roses and vegetables need full sun but sometimes people try to grow them with fewer hours of sunshine than that. This always leads to problems.
I recently made a short video on the subject of mildew and it will soon be posted on my blog.