Every owner of a vegetable garden, an allotment, or even a few pots with their own tomatoes or cucumbers displayed on the balcony knows how difficult a battle must be fought against diseases and other pests that appear during the season.
In home growing, we are almost always interested in getting the most organic products that have not been scaled by chemical pesticides, or so-called sprays. We can also grow really healthy and organic fruits or vegetables without the use of chemicals through natural ways and patents, which will certainly be much healthier for the later results of our garden work.
Natural ways to fight diseases in the vegetable garden allow us to maintain an organic cultivation that does not negatively affect our health. It is true that ecological remedies, in order to be effective, should be applied as early as possible, that is, as soon as we observe worrying symptoms. Also, we will have to wait a little longer for the effects, and the treatment itself will sometimes have to be repeated several times. In addition to the obvious considerations, natural ways of fighting diseases of garden plants have their additional advantages. These include the easy availability of semi-finished products, as well as the low cost of preparing the “spray”. Interestingly, products you already have at home, such as yeast, garlic, baking soda or cinnamon, or those you can gather from a nearby meadow, such as nettle or field horsetail, will suffice to prepare most preparations.
Prepare a stock of 200 g of pressed garlic and 10 l of water, boiling for about 20 minutes. Once cooled and strained, it will work well for the first signs of gray mold, rust, powdery mildew, potato blight or bacterial angular spot of cucumber. You can also use it prophylactically.
A decoction of 1 kg of nettle and 10 l of water will also come to our aid in the fight against diseases, which, when cooled, will be an effective weapon against gray mold, rust, powdery mildew, as well as cabbage syphilis.
An infusion of 200 g of horsetail and 10 l of water boiled for about half an hour will be a great preventive measure and will effectively combat rust, spotting, powdery mildew or leaf curl.
Yeast, as a single-celled fungus, is extremely effective against multicellular fungi responsible for many diseases. It is enough to prepare a solution of 10 dag of yeast dissolved in 10 l of water with the addition of half a liter of fat milk. We can use such a spray on gray mold, potato blight and powdery mildew.
Spraying with cinnamon is great for disease prevention, so it is worth using it at the beginning of the season. To prepare it, you need 4 teaspoons of loose cinnamon poured over cool water and set aside overnight.
When powdery mildew appears in our garden, we can use a solution prepared from 2 liters of water, 5 ml of gray soap and a tablespoon of baking soda to fight it. If the powdery mildew does not go away after the first treatment, repeat the action after a few days.
Gray soap dissolved in a water solution is by far the better known in the fight against garden pests, but few people know that it is also effective against gray mold.
Zdjęcie główne: pixabay.com/JerzyGorecki
