Reaching the end - The Butternut-bed..

After a long absence due to work and academics, we are back! Regardless of how long it's been since we've posted an update, the garden has still been running it's course.

Seeing as this was our first, and very experimental attempt at a home-grown-organic-veggie-patch, a lot of lessons were learnt through the ups and downs of the garden. In the end, a lot of rewards came from the experience, along with the frustrations of pests and diseases that we also had to endure.

Two of our butternuts - The other fruits
are not from our garden ;)

We had five butternut-plants in our bottom bed. These guys started slowly but were soon growing at an amazing pace and soon crawled well beyond their own bed - and then came the powdery-mildew. Many plants appear to be succeptable to this fungal disease that appears as a white or grayish powdery growth on leaves, stems and buds. It started off slowly on one or too leaves, and then it spread quickly onto all five plants. Once a leaf was covered in it, it soon wilted and died.

This process goes quite quickly and pretty soon our first casualty came. The butternut-plant was left without a single leaf, it's stem drying out and it's one butternut at the end. Luckily, the mildew did not harm the fruit. We harvested it and pulled the dead plant out. This pattern surged through the bed, killing off all five the plants and leaving us with 3 butternuts - quite a tiny harvest! Nonetheless, we ate one of the butternuts recently and it was heavenly.. Dare I say, it was definitely the most tasty, scrumptious butternut I had had in a long time.

There are apparently a few ways one can treat this problem.. One we used, although we started it up a bit late, was actually quite effective:

Get your hands on some Ascorbic-Acid (Vitamin C) from any pharmacy or co-op. You can even just buy cheap and simple generic Vitamin C pills and crush them up. Mix a teaspoon or two into about a litre of water and spray this on the effected areas. Remember to spray under the leaves as well. This worked well to dry out the mildew and it made most of it die away - but you have to do this daily for as long as possible. It helped once we started but the damage was already done.

Apparently, something that works even faster, which can be used together with the Ascorbic acid, is Plant/Food grade hydrogen-peroxide. Here's a great link to the uses of it. Spray it on the same way you would the Vitamin C - dosage I'm not sure of.

Here's another link to some other approaches to countering this disease. If you have any tips/ideas on this topic, feel free to share them!

Next time we'll definitely be better prepared to preventing this disease from claiming our plants!