Milk as a Fungicide?

Here midway down the newsletter from Nichols Garden Nursery is an interesting discussion about milk being used to combat powdery mildew.

http://www.nicholsgardennursery.com/newsandresources.htm

The diluted milk mixture was my sole weapon against powdery mildew on my squash and cucumbers last year. I can report that, with vigilance, the 1 to 9 ratio of milk & water did a good job of controlling (not curing) the mildew. I was able to get respectable harvests from all the widely infected plants. This year I have better spraying equipment and will use this method again if necessary.

Wayne

It worked great for me on the powdery mildew on my Plox, I had tried other things, soda, neem, soap, but nothing worked as well as the milk.
I plan to use it again this year as soon as I see any, but I hope I wiil not need to.
Josephine.

We had a discussion here about the use of milk as a fungicide last year. I don't recommend using milk myself. http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/532490/

I missed the previous discussion - sorry if I'm reinventing the wheel...have you had adverse results, Baa?

I was too lazy to rewrite the posts I'd made previously, that's all LOL

I wrote the following over two posts:

"Milk is a strong pollutant of water and there is no mention of this in that section, nor is it mentioned that it's effect against Mildew is reduced to the point of causing other fungal problems when reaching 3 parts milk to 10 parts water."

"It's the bacteria that aids the decomposition of milk that causes the main problems in waterways. As the milk degrades the bacteria uses up a huge amount of oxygen, 1 litre of decomposing milk will use up all the oxygen in as much as 10,000 litres of water. Milk can also enable greater growths of fungus and algae too and generally cause problems with the water course ecology.

We just recently had an incident in the local river, a local business tipped all their out of date milk into the drains which come straight out into the river just a few hundred yards from here. The Environment Agency (government group) was straight down testing the water and I suspect the company will face rather large fines (I know they do that for farmers who let even minute amounts escape into the water courses). Even though it's a tidal river (we're near the Solent which has a unique double tide) it took several days for the 'bloom' and smell to disappear."

I felt it worth mentioning so that others who may be considering this can see there is more using this milk solution than the links mention.

This is good to know. But I really can't imagine that a mild milk solution applied to a few plants is going to be very harmful or irresponsible. That incident with the out of date milk dumped directly into the water is a different animal, of course.

The main concern for me if how unused solution is discarded. OK should one gardener throw his half pint of milk solution on the garden or down the drain it may only cause a small, temporary change. Imagine how many gardeners have read such information and used this milk solution, all of us on DG may have discarded the solution safely but that's not counting a huge amount of others who may or may not be so particular, a few even increasing the level of milk believing more will work faster or better!

I was a dairyman for a few years so I'm very familiar milk and the potential problems it causes diluted or not. While people are going to use this method anyway, I've just added my thoughts and experiences to the discussion because I don't feel the links about the milk solution are giving anything other than an outline on it's use. Were this a factory made pesticide either organic or not organic there would be warnings given on the packet as a requirement.

Okay, good points.

Thanks for alerting us to the other side of this issue, Baa.

My pleasure :)

I'd like to advocate more environmentally friendly and organic ways to control powdery mildew, such as observing planting distances, pruning out congested stems, ensuring correct feeding and watering etc.

This message was edited May 13, 2006 5:02 PM