Gardening medicine

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Some of you may remember that I have been making Comfrey Tea. The other day I applied the first “brew” to my tomato plants. I want to show you the effect it had.

This is a “Cherokee Purple” tomato plant, photographed on 23 June. It looks weak, and its leaves are pale and brown at the edges. At the time, I suspected this might be a symptom of the weedkiller contamination that has affected many of my tomatoes.

A couple of days after that photo was taken, I applied the Comfrey feed. Now look at it:

The plant’s latest set of leaves is a huge amount healthier – strong-looking and green, as they should be. Even the leaves that were previously yellow have greened-up. This is surely ample confirmation of the restorative powers of Comfrey Tea!

I have three more buckets-full of Comfrey Tea on the go already, and many of the cuttings I planted are showing signs of growth, but I’m thinking I might soon pay another visit to the place where I foraged the Comfrey, to get another lot of this valuable “garden medicine”.

On a related theme, I also want to make a mention of a remedy for mildew which I have recently tried with some success. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that one of my big Sage plants was covered with
powdery mildew. I had read in a few places about milk being good for treating mildew and I had always considered this to be an “Old Wives Tale”, but on this occasion I thought it would be worth a try. Even if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t cost me a lot! So I made up a sprayer-bottle’s worth of liquid: milk and water 50:50, and sprayed it liberally all over the Sage plant. It DID work! I haven’t got a “Before” photo, but the “After” photo certainly shows a healthy (and mildew-free) Sage plant, spilling out of the border onto the shingle..

I suspect that in this case I just got lucky. The remedy would probably not work in every instance. Home-made  / traditional remedies like this are often a bit hit-and-miss. For instance I have tried loads of different suggestions for killing aphids and whitefly, such as garlic spray, an infusion of cloves and of chilli powder (don’t mention washing-up liquid!), but they haven’t really been very successful.

I have seen lots of mentions on blogs this year of the disease Rust, particularly on Leeks and Garlic. Presumably the weather conditions have just suited it. I have it on my Broad Beans:

It looks very unsightly, but at this stage of the game I’m not too fussed, because most of my beans have already been harvested. If it had been this bad a month ago, I would have been worried, though in all honesty I don’t think Rust on beans is a huge issue. I suppose it might stop the leaves photosynthesising sunlight, and thus reduce the plants’ vigour, but it never seems to damage the beans themselves.

So, does anyone have a remedy for Rust that doesn’t involve commercial chemicals?

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