Re: Late Blight Outbreak

**M* S* <m*@gmail.com>**

Thank you, Kathryn. That is fascinating. I am particularly interested in
composting in situ--I'm willing to believe it but would want to do one field
that way and rotate away from it in another field--covering both
possibilities. I'm no longer growing on the kind of scale where that sort of
work is a possibility--I'm in a garden at this point and haven't experienced
those problems --yet. But if someon on the list tries it, I'd love to hear
about the experience.

Miranda

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Kathryn Marsh <kmarsh@iol.ie> wrote:

> Milk is a very effective fungicide diluted with water in a ration of
> 1:3. The original work was done in Brazil against powdery mildew but
> at this stage there is anecdotal evidence that it works for many
> foliar fungal diseases. I've heard of it being used effectively for
> both black spot and rust on roses but haven't had cause to try it
> since I've already cured those with compost - the wild roses in my
> hedges were full of both when we moved here. Milk is actually a
> licensed fungicide in the Netherlands.
>
> There was work done back in the 30s that indicated that in fact we are
> tackling late blight all wrong and that in fact we should be
> encouraging the soil bacteria that attack late blight by composting
> all the residues in situ and going on growing in the same place. More
> work has been done on this recently, now that we have better soil
> science, and it seems to support this viewpoint. A friend in West Cork
> has been experimenting on this basis for the last 20 years or so and
> now has no blight on his holding, which is in one of the areas in
> which phytophthera was first recorded when it appeared in Ireland back
> in the 1840s. I was down there a week and a half ago and whereas crops
> in this area, which gets blight much later than the Cork area, were
> affected as long ago as May, he has never a trace on his plants. While
> he does grow his own strain bred from the Hungarian resistant
> varieties, he is also growing twenty or so other kinds which are
> traditionally regarded as blight prone. He selects from the "hazards"
> which remain in the ground overwinter, and have therefore lived with
> the blight in the previous season and survived. He has also grown on
> from the random crosses which occur, selecting only for disease
> resistance and flavour, not for yield. (His yields are enormous
> anyway, largely because of the intensive mulching he has carried out
> down the years in order to be able to grow anything at all on what was
> originally a rocky hillside but is now temperate woodland with
> cultivated clearings - ideal blight conditions
>
> kathryn
>
>
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