It's the spray. It burned your plants like it would burn your mouth. Hose it off.

Why did you spray?

Your heading is 'organic fertiliser'. It rather sounds as if you need to do a bit more research before hitting your plants with home brewed concoctions. A pesticide (which is what your mixture purported to be) is not a fertiliser. As susanzone5 said, what was the reason for deciding to spray your plants? Apart from a few small holes most of the damage looks like the result of the spray. Plants don't have to be aesthetically perfect to give you a crop and it looks as if your spray has done more harm than good. What was the recipe and what was it supposed to do? I would water as needed, leave the plants alone and hope they recover.

Deleted duplicate post...

This post was edited by susanzone5 on Wed, Jul 17, 13 at 17:17

What concentrations? It's possible the soap was too concentrated - it can easily burn plants.

Yet another example of how these home-made concoctions can do more harm than good when mixed and used inappropriately.

ivory soap, chopped up garlic and cayenne
Might kill a few bugs if sprayed right on the bug but has no fertilizer or fungicide benefits.

Dave

The problem is there's a huge community out there that doesn't understand how things work, yet advise people that it's just awesome. For the most part I don't blame the people that pick up the information as much as I blame the people giving out the information.

Garlic is an antifungal agent...garlic as an antifungal on plants is rather weak, though. That doesn't stop 100000 websites and armchair horticulturalists from advising it's use. There's even some that will boldly state it works just as well as commercial antifungals on plants. Bad information feeding bad information for cut/paste advice agents masquerading as helpful information.

There are a lot of things that are antifungal...tons...from vitamin c to garlic to witch hazel to silver to marigolds...etc etc

Just having an antifungal property isn't enough to battle plant fungus in all cases, though. It's kind of like how aspirin can relieve pain, but so can Oxycontin. You need the right product for the job you're trying to accomplish.

The whole idea/method behind garlic as an antifungal is it's sulfur content. It's just not as effective as most people would want it to be for high pressure/high danger areas. Copper sulfate + lime (not the citrus) mixtures or direct sulfur mixtures (mixed/applied properly, for both) tend to be both cheaper and are more effective organic solutions to antifungal control in plants.

It's neat to pull something considered food off the shelf and use it for an organic control, but there's usually cheaper and more powerful ways to achieve a lot of organic controls.

OK guys...I get the picture, I did a stupid thing. I believed all those Utube videos describing recipes. There was nothing wrong with the veggies, they looked great, but I thought I would be proactive and "prevent" bugs. I was wrong.

Of course i quit spraying and the plants have recovered although the leaves the spray did hit look awful. Thanks for the advice...or should I say chastisement. We all learn eventually don't we? Thanks.

You didn't do a stupid thing, honestly. Chances are the plants will live and be just fine. You even took the care to apply it when sun damage from application would be at a minimum. There was a legit thought process as well as proper timing behind it's application...it just didn't go well.

When there's 100000 sites out there telling you it's awesome, it's hard to not think it's awesome.

It will even work for some people. In areas with high pressure from fungal attack (long hot/moist spring/summer/fall), it probably won't work as great.

It's also worth mentioning that you might want to separate your anti-fungal controls from your pest controls rather than looking for an all-in-one.

I wouldn't give up on the insecticidal soap thing (soap/water without the garlic/pepper/etc) if you have a need for soft body pest control. It works great when you have soft body (aphids, etc) type bugs to control. It's one of the most important tools in my arsenal for aphids, but it's best used on direct application, not preventative care.

This post was edited by nc-crn on Wed, Jul 17, 13 at 20:16

But for future reference "proactive [preventative] bug control", regardless of the spray used, is never recommended. Not only because it doesn't work - the control has to be sprayed on the bugs - but because it almost always kills more beneficial bugs and harms more plants than the bad bug would have done in the first place.

Proactive fungicide use does have a place in the garden since they are primarily preventatives, not cures. But even then only under certain conditions and only when the spray used is actually a fungicide.

But YouTube, as a source of information, should always be viewed with a skeptic's eye until that info can be verified by other sources.

Still you learned a valuable lesson for the future. :-)

Dave

Thank you. I really did learn a lot from my post so I'm glad I asked the question. Now, I have two quart jars of really smelly "Linda's bug juice" I need to throw outside somewhere. Phew! Thanks again for your help, I did learn from the post.