Powdery Mildew Control

Cheap, Safe & Easy to Use Home Remedies for Powdery Mildew Control.

Powdery Mildew is a plant fungal disease that never fails to shock home gardeners. It shows up as a sudden emergence of white powdery spots on plant’s leaves, stems, and fruits that were otherwise healthy a day before.

It starts off as white spots appearing on the underside of the leaves, quickly spreading to the surface on top in a matter of a few hours. As the disease advances, the spots get bigger until every inch of the plant is covered in a white, powdery substance.

In your home garden, vine plants like zucchini, cucumber, squash, zucchini, cucumber, squash, grapes, and melon and others like tomato, pepper are most likely to come under a powdery mildew attack.

Flowering plants like zinnias, roses, dahlias, chrysanthemum, and sunflowers too can get infected.

What Causes Powdery Mildew?

Different species of trees, shrubs, vines, flowers, fruits, grasses, field crops, and weeds get infected by different fungal spices spores. Which means that, if you have a cluster of Zucchini plants and one of them gets attacked by powdery mildew, the rest will be infected soon enough. But the good news is that since the spores are species specific, the attack will be contained to the zucchini plants and won’t spread to any other plant species.

How Powdery Mildew Spreads?

Powdery Mildew disease is caused by the fungi spores already present in the organic debris. They start growing when the climate is sufficiently warm and dry. Fungi spores are microscopic, meaning that they can’t be seen by naked eyes. In some ways, they are like seeds, as they too remain dormant until they get the ideal conditions to germinate/reproduce. Once active, they multiply quickly. As they start multiplying, they travel to other plants and soil via wind, insects, and splashing of water.

Can Powdery Mildew Kill your plants?

Powdery mildew grows on the leaf’s surface, leaching the nutrients it requires from the leaf itself. Nutrients that would have otherwise fueled the plant’s growth are stolen. Leaves covered by it also cannot carry out photosynthesis, resulting in less formation of plant food.

If the disease remains untreated, a severe infection results in yellowing and distortion of leaves, flowers, fruits and buds.

In the advanced stage of the disease, you will see leaves wilting, branches in dieback, premature leaf drops, blemishes on fruits, and buds that won’t open.

Overall yield and quality of flowers and fruits deteriorate.s

Powdery Mildew Control with 5 Home Remedies

The saying: ‘Prevention is better than cure’ goes well with powdery mildew. There are certain preventive steps that can save our plants from this disease.

The same methods are used to remove and control its spread. These are cheap but effective home remedies that can control powdery mildew.

Though all the below given remedies are organic and safe, do test them out on a small portion of the plant and wait for 24 hours to ensure that there aren’t any adverse effects.

All spraying, except the milk spray, should be carried out early morning before sunrise or in the late evening after sunset to avoid plant sunburn.

I will be sharing four cheap organic remedies that only use things available in our homes and in the end, one remedy that is 100% free, to kill powdery mildew in plants.

Let’s check them out one by one.

Powdery Mildew Control with Neem Oil Spray

Neem oil is the only insecticide and pesticide we use when it comes to dealing with pests and diseases in our plants. It works wonderfully with powdery mildew too.

If we use it at the first sign of the disease, Neem Oil spray has the infection under control within a day’s time. You just have to completely drench the affected parts like leaves, stem while spraying for it to work. Spray on both sides of the leaves.

Repeat the spray every second or third day to fully remove the spores.

Once you get rid of powdery mildew completely, switch to weekly preventive spraying.

100% free remedy for powdery mildew control.

Want a way to treat powdery mildew without spending a penny? Move the plant to a place where it gets 8 or more hours of sunlight.

Powdery Mildew fungi spore grow when temperature is between 20 to 30° C. By placing the plant in the Sun, the temperature on the leaf surface will go beyond 30°C and kill fungi spores.