melons and fungicide
daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
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Comments (21)
wayne_5 zone 6a Central Indiana
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agodaninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoRelated Discussions
What are the earliest melons?
Comments (13)Have you thought about spraying your melons for insects and disease? Melons are fruit, so fruit sprays should be adequate. One should check with other locals to see which sprays work in your area. If you don't want to spray, and/or just want early melons, and don't especially care what they look like, how big they grow, or what color the flesh is, then I would suggest Farthest North Melon Mix developed by Tim Peters of Peters Seed and Research. Many people have had very good luck with the mix. Farthest North is a grex, not an actual cultivar or landrace. A grex is a genetically diverse mixture. Breeders who breed grexes often start with a couple plants each of several different cultivars. They let those plants cross with each other, and save the seeds from the fruit. The seeds then get planted the next year, and the plants get all crossed again. The resulting 2nd generation seeds have an extremely high diversity of genes. Here is a link that might be useful: Farthest North Melon Mix...See MoreWatermelon fungicides?
Comments (3)i am becoming a huge fan of neem, which has completely cleared up fungal problems on my cucurbits (vining veg & fruit). it's best to get one guaranteed high in azadirachtin. it's very difficult to find it, but even the stuff from the hardware store ("triple action" from fertilome -- you can get it from the ACE on the Boulevard) will do the trick. it's kicked the black-spot on my roses, dealt with some insect problems, and it's totally organic. i'm in deland, too. drop me a line & maybe we'll do a garden visit. i did a LOT of research, and this is the real thing: Here is a link that might be useful: supreme neem...See MoreDisease of pepino melon
Comments (4)Hi You can't lift them off as intact lesions, but it is possible to scrape them off the stem and they kind of crumble into powder - the lesions themselves are flat and vary in size a lot. I'm unsure how to attach another picture, but the picture of the whole plant isn't very detailed - the plant is quite big and overall looks green and healthy from afar, it's only when closer that it's obvious there is something covering it. I've also noticed that any flowers the plant produces are just falling off and dying too. I'm trying dithane fungicide now in the hope that does something. Thanks for all your help...See MoreDo you apply fungicide before disease shows up?
Comments (23)Chris, I understand the desire of hobby gardeners to maintain the health of their tomato plants and the problems they face especially in disease prone regions. While I may think there's a lot of babying of tomatoes going on in this "heirloom" hobby ... others feel justified in what they do to guarantee maximum success. If that means spraying fungicides, then I suppose it's a personal choice the individual home gardener must make. Personally, I fall in ranks with Big Daddy and try to find ways around spraying fungicides. But I'm not nearly as industrious as Big Daddy, nor nearly as experienced, so I have struggled this year in particular. About 25% of my small plot has succumbed to one degree or another to wilt and other as yet unidentified foliar diseases. This is the first year I've had anything this drastic happen. Some of the varieties that were perfectly healthy over the past several years went down in mid July this year. Others are going down now. Such is life. What I've done is prune very heavily near the bottom of the plants and pruned more heavily that usual up the plant especially suckers. I've pulled out about five plants that were heavily wilted and will pull out a few more this week. I won't be growing certain varieties ever again, and I will be soaking my saved seeds in a brief Clorox bath after a long ferment. Additionally, I am going to limit seed trades since I've noticed foliar diseases in the past two years that I've never seen before and that I understood were not native to Southwest Indiana. I'm not one who thinks hybrids with special disease resistance is the only answer. While I believe hybrids with built-in resistence are an aid to commercial tomato growers who generally are producing red tomatoes with smooth shoulders and who also tend to use fungicides and pesticides on a regular schedule. That is just the reality of the situation and is not applicable to my hobby gardening. So ... I will continue to select varieties that show from experience that they are tolerant or resistent to the foliar disorders that have shown up in my garden. It matters little to me whether they are open pollinated or hybrids since I'm creating my own hybrids and growing them out anyway ... they're all of value in my book so long as they're strong, productive, good looking, and taste good. On the otherhand, and to illustrate my feelings about small commercial truck gardeners, let me post a few photographs of a friend of mine's tomato plants. He has about 25 acres under cultivation this year with sweet corn, tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, squash, eggplants, peppers, onions and okra. He has a roadside stand, sells wholesale to restaurants and grocery stores, and wholesales to other seasonal local vendors who operate their own farm markets and stands. Jim grows nothing but hybrid tomatoes, and most of the rest of his produce is hybrid varieties, except I think Blue Lake green beans. He sprays with Bravo and Serenade as well as other pesticides. All his tomatoes are under black strip plastic with drip irrigation. All are in cage supports 4.5 feet tall with additional metal support stakes. Most of his cukes, peppers, and eggplants also are set up with plastic sheet mulch and drip irrigation. He's 71 years old, plants everything himself with his daughter and wife, and hires highschool students during the summer to pick and other chores for 9 bucks an hour. He is a wonderful and industrious man. Here are a few shots of his garden with tomatoes 100 plants to the row, etc. ... Some Big Beef ... his personal favorite ... alongside his F-150 Ford pick-up, like mine, a local favorite. More Big Beef ... he probably grows, I didn't count, maybe 10 - 12 rows 100 Big Beef plants each row. The rows are kinda long and green ... ... and numerous ... He plants Mt. Fresh, a Randy Gardner local favorite, as his fall tomato crop. Here's a close-up of the Mt. Fresh to show how he sets up his cages. He's trying out some Solar Set (first five plants to the left) to see how it does in the mid-summer heat. Unfortunately it gets the Early Blight. I saw two whole rows (200 plants) of Solar Set in another part of the field ... all with the blight even though he'd sprayed Bravo. Here's some peppers and eggplant. He grows humongous Bell peppers and some sort of fairly older hybrid variety of ordinary black eggplants. Curiously, the eggplants were infested with something that looked almost identical to Early Blight but some of the plants seemed almost immune while the rest were infested. His peppers were 100% healthy. He also grows Carmen peppers and they were awesome. Here's his equally industious wife gazing at Jim and probably wondering ... "why me, oh Lord?" Southernwestern Indiana was populated largely by hard working German immigrants who came here in two waves ... 1830s and 1880s ... daggone good hard working folks just exactly like this wonderful couple. Bill...See Morewayne_5 zone 6a Central Indiana
3 years agomxk3 z5b_MI
3 years agodaninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agodaninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agowayne_5 zone 6a Central Indiana
3 years agodaninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agovgkg Z-7 Va
3 years agomxk3 z5b_MI
3 years agodaninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agotheforgottenone1013 (SE MI zone 5b/6a)
3 years agowayne_5 zone 6a Central Indiana
3 years agomxk3 z5b_MI
3 years agowayne_5 zone 6a Central Indiana
3 years agomxk3 z5b_MI
3 years agodaninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years ago
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daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)Original Author