Quote:
Originally Posted by RJGlew
Bill - Your work is very interesting - thank you for sharing. The folks who view themselves as being most ecologically informed refer to bleach as a "toxic bath" - have you had any push back from those folks to your research?
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I really don't worry about what they say. I just know it works and has helped me maintain fairly healthy plants beyond the normal life expectancy of tomatoes in this climate. I do almost all of my soil amending organically but found out the hard way that the so called organic solutions for many foliage diseases don't work in these conditions and they are ridiculously expensive in many cases. Since the bleach oxidizes so quickly and leaves the plants so much better off why would I not use it? Copper spray is considered organic or approved for organic use but leaves much more residue and I know that too much of it is harmful. If you use it responsibly and don't breath the fumes or spray yourself in the eyes I don't see what harm it can do. It certainly doesn't seem to bother the insects on the plants either the pests or the friendlies.
I found this solution to some of my gardening problems totally by accident when I was spraying down my house siding to remove mildew and accidentally soaked a climbing rose that was riddled with leaf spot. I thought I had killed it because so many leaves turned brown and fell off but a week later it looked better than it ever had just without all those bad looking leaves so I started experimenting with it on tomato plants which were not responding to the usual fungicides. I damaged a few plants starting off too strong but eventually got it as near right as I could without any chemical experience beyond high school. I did consult a couple of friends of mine who are chemist and they said if I could get the mix strong enough to kill or slow the disease without severely damaging the healthy leaves that it might work.
I also tried it on other plants and found it equally effective. It even took me a while to realize that the best use of it was to use it very early in a disease cycle instead of waiting to use it as a last resort. Waiting too long just means that more leaves are infected and thus more leaves can be lost from the treatment. The first year or so that I used it I only used it as a last resort and so the treatment seemed harsh but when I started using it early, as soon as a disease appeared, then the treatment was not harsh at all. The biggest damage it seems to do is to sprayers if they are not rinsed immediately. I found a back pack sprayer that is rated for using mild bleach and have been using the same sprayer for 7 years or so and it has had hundreds of gallons of the mix run through it in that time. I usually mix up 3 gallons at a time and it takes that much to spray all my plants. With the rainy weather we are having right now I am spraying about twice a week. When it gets dry and the diseases less frequent then I will depend more on the fungicides preventing the diseases but right now I can't keep them on the plants because of the hard rains we have been having every day or two.
Talking about this reminds me it is about daylight now and it rained day before yesterday so I'm going out and spraying everything again this morning.
Of course I will have to douse myself with DEET or lose a lot of blood to the mosquitoes. That part of the spraying I hate.
Bill