I put down a good spray of sulfur in the real early Spring. In the past our summer squash has been always been infected with pm by now 
Not a hint, my camera’s screwy, those light patches are sunlight reflections.
4 Likes
Finishing the mildew off while it’s dormant is a radical idea. That works perfectly 
The annual version of the mildew dies so easy! Your mildew free pumpkins are something the ucdavis dudes said was impossible. I’m getting the feeling mildew doesn’t spread as easily as people think. Like, that shit’s definitely NOT blowing in the wind.
2 Likes
Just from my experiences these last couple of years, I agree. I think there is some confusion with downy mildew. I haven’t had it, but our extension agent sends out a link that tracks it as it spreads up the East Coast every year.
Zero pm on our zinnias and bee balm, too 
4 Likes
I had never thought about what the mildew was doing during it’s different phases of existence. thepotanist was the one who said the word dormant and I was like duuuh. Dormant and Active cycle! It’s most vulnerable in the dormant phase… lurking on downed plant material. Waiting to spring into action! If you hit it once during this phase, it’s fuuuucked. It’s when the organism is in Active cycle it requires two sprays. One for the active life form, and one to finish off anything still dormant. That explains the 50/50 chance of destroying it with one single spray when it’s active.
Now here’s the strange part eh? This has to do with it’s “spread” or whatever. OK so buddy makes a garden and it’s a fresh patch. Growing pumpkins say, or weed. Brings in infested plant material and the mildew is everywhere. Sells the place and the new owners start growing in the garden. Mildew infestation comes from nowhere. So they think. This happened to one of my neighbors! I can see their garden, and I know it’s infested with pumpkin mildew. In fact, I think they gave up growing squash because of the mildew. The Achilles heel was they had bought the plant seedlings from the store.
3 Likes
Oh hi there. Are you waiting for me to pry more information out of this parasite? Perhaps you are curious about… how far it can spread unaided. I know it can’t go 20 feet/6 meters. I know it can travel .5 meters no problem. hah hah silly rabbit that’s quite a delta to put it in math terms. Perhaps you can shave it down a bit from 6 meters? Ahoy matey! I see red clover colonies on the horizon!
You can tell from just looking, this is a different colony from the aster and the comfrey. Symphytum, not to be taken internally. Now I just have to look around for the closest red clover plant that’s not infested. hmmm…
3 Likes
Well… tentatively I’ll say perhaps 3 meters? Seems like it might not be able to jump a 3 meter gap. I say “seems” because I can’t detect any mildew on the host plant at that distance. I’m not saying with 100% certainty YET that it’s not secretly incubating on the plant where I didn’t look. So that cuts the spread area by quite a bit if that turns out to be true. I’ll keep my eye on the situation and I put some sticks in the ground beside the test subjects. One plant completely infested and one I can’t detect the parasite.
If you can see those two small sticks in the weeds there. I picked an area that wasn’t riddled in host plants.
3 Likes
lol, man I went back and read a thousand posts where I kept stomping on that guy and his brigade who told me you couldn’t get rid of mildew. I was downright dismissive of all his “anecdotes”. bwah hah hah hah that was 2 years ago! Lookit me now! That stupid shit didn’t hold me back from discovering the “dormant” eradication method. Back in early 2020 I didn’t even really know how to finish the mildew off outside or how far it spreads. wow! So, that’s what the trolls did for me. Really accelerated the study. Thousand bucks says that’s not what they expected to happen.
4 Likes
Well I’m glad you did all this research for us @JoeCrowe - thank you! 
2 Likes
Yep, been a super wet year here, and could see the difference between the sprayed and autos which didn’t get sprayed. Didn’t figure necessary con the autos since we usually don’t see much pm until fall.
2 Likes
Next year you can go nuclear on the mildew colony and finish it off before putting any plants outside. Just spray the area where the infected plants were growing. That’s the radical kill while the mildew is dormant.
The stupid parasite has been replicating around here, and it’s already visible on the clover, comfrey, and asters. Garden plants are clean and no cannabis mildew to be found heh heh it never came back after 20 plus years now. People are still thinking it blows in the wind, lol!
6 Likes
control. Just left there untreated!
I can do the splits and touch this plant with my toe. This plant was treated in the spring along with the mildew hosts in the garden and greenhouse.
2 Likes
So what I have noticed is that it seems like the mildew from the wild aster is spreading to the dandelions. Yet I wonder… is that really true? Can that mildew infest the annual plant? Will it winter over and re-infest it? Is that just opportunistic? Honestly, I haven’t seen any mildew on dandelions. Eh… really got me thinking I should go out there and see what’s what in the mildew patch. I can use the microscope to tell them apart! Or, to see if they are doing the same thing.
2 Likes
Crikey mon!!! Those two plants are in the same family 
fucking Asteraceae
holy shit… time to go smoke some hash and absorb those details.
2 Likes
Oh my! I suppose the things I didn’t know about dandelions would fill a warehouse. They are perennial plants just like the wild aster. Same family. Oh, I wonder why the aster mildew would infest the dandelions? Duh.
I’ll still check the colony even though I’m pretty certain I know the answer already.
1 Like
Slap some measurements on there! MAture pods are almost 80 microns… long? oops! No they are 30 microns, I accidentally picked the wrong magnification before measuring.
4 Likes
Well the pods on the comfrey are 40 microns and the wild aster is 30 microns. I’m going to have to find more aster colonies, because it seems I focused more on the strange clusters than the individual pods. I don’t see any clusters yet on the dandelions!
4 Likes
Saw this larvae while I was scanning. I think it’s a syrphid fly?
OK so despite everything, the mildew colonies look similar yet so different. I didn’t see any of those strange clusters. I’d use the scientific name, but it’ll be flagged as a typo, lol!
4 Likes
Lucky I didn’t place any money on that outcome, I would have to pay myself for losing! The colonies on the dandelion and aster look way different, except the pod size is still 30 microns. So what I’m going to do, is let the colony on the dandelion mature for a while. See if any pods form. IF there are none by the end of the season, those are completely different colonies! ooof the last thing I want to do is leap to a conclusion, it never works out.
3 Likes