Ginger talking about dripping leaves shows one of the main reasons for having to do more pruning. With high humidity it takes much longer for leaves to dry and if they have insufficient air flow parts of the plant stay wet for far too long and as a result you get more diseases. I sometimes go out very early in the morning and when the plants are tall like now and the humidity is high the sound of dripping water coming off the plants sounds like it just rained. I know you have to deal with that kind of high humidity also and it takes some time to learn what works in those conditions. I can see why you use copper a lot since it does stick better than Daconil. I sprayed with Daconil at sundown yesterday because other than gray mold on some plants, Early Bight is giving me more problems than spot diseases right now and Daconil seems to work better for that. I plan to switch over to copper for my next spraying.
I am dreading all the work I will have to do in pruning the dying diseased leaves off resulting from the bleach spray yesterday morning. I started yesterday afternoon and just working on 12 plants filled a big black lawn bag with debris. A lot of it came from the two black tomato plants that had more extensive gray mold issues than I thought. The bleach spray really makes it apparent and helps with deciding what to remove because of its affect on the diseased leaves even on the ones where you can't actually see the disease before the diluted bleach is applied. One of my Indian Stripes which had become really bushy was really riddled with gray mold and I'm just hoping I slowed it down in time. I usually spot gray mold sooner but with the thickness of the plant I just failed to see the early signs which were deep in the plant cover. Over the years I have found that once gray mold gets too deeply in a plant that there is just no stopping it. Maybe it penetrates into the plant and becomes almost a systemic disease like Late Blight; it sure seems like it sometimes. Other times when it is caught early and treated with the dilute bleach and a fungicide it might come back but not severely and is fairly easily controlled. I rarely grow a black variety that it doesn't get some gray mold on it during its life span.
Bill
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