The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Fruit => Topic started by: pgkevet on March 25, 2015, 12:41:27 pm
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I make my own mixture up from Calcium Oxide and Copper Sulphate (sourced from ebay) according to th wikepedia instructions.
Last autumn had a nasty outbreak of a botrytis type fungus on all my citrus after putting them away in winter quarters. They all got thoroughly sprayed with a 50% stronger soln to the point where there were great globs of copper deposit everywhere. it stopped things almost at once and it's ony last week i started rinsing them off.
its way way cheaper than buying it premade.
I've just given my peach tree it's second spraying of the season (last a month ago) as the buds are just thinking about breaking. I dont think i was aggressive enough last year and still got the dreaded curl. This year not only sprayed the tree but a good circle of ground around it.
And for pottaoes the plan is to spray them prophylactically rather than at first signs of blight - as in the first hint of a smith period from blightwatch (I trust you're all signed up.. it's free) they're going to get nuked with my mix.
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Damn. I really thought this thread was going to be about wine! ;D
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Me, too.
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A pair of lushes?
Half the wines out there are semisynthetic mixes anway.. a dash of grape juice, some colour, cheap alcohol (or antifreeze)....
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1055820/Why-selling-wines-alcopops-dressed-flavourings-fancy-labels.html (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1055820/Why-selling-wines-alcopops-dressed-flavourings-fancy-labels.html)
I'll see how my vines do this year.. a small chance of some grapes but last year was the first year they showed signs of decent growth.
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A pair of lushes?
Well, I can't answer for Womble, but..... :roflanim: :roflanim:
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Good job you can since they've delisted Bordeaux mix with no suitable alternative on the market. Fortunately I kept thinking I needed to buy more over the last couple of years and have built up quite a stock!
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Copper is extremely toxic :o. I certainly wouldn't be covering my crops with great gobs of it, and contaminating my soil :(
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Errrr - copper is NOT EXTREMELY toxic. Granted your probably wouldn't want to eat it neat but it is an essential trace element to our health. There are plenty of health issues if you are deficient in copper and our bodies are not the best in absorbing it but pretty good at expelling it so plenty of cases of people needing to take additional copper. I'm certainly not concerned with my one or two sprays a year of the fruit trees before the buds have even broken.
H
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Not toxic as in 'fall down dead' toxic, but too much copper in the human body leads to all sorts of imbalances and negative effects - look it up.
The mining of copper uses heavy metals in the process and together they can cause extreme environmental pollution such as:
http://geo-mexico.com/?p=11919 (http://geo-mexico.com/?p=11919) and in many other mining countries. I care about that.
Copper is one of the trace elements we all need, but we don't need too much of it, and we don't need it in the soil.
I work my land organically, so any poison, including heavy metals, is an unnecessary contaminant. For those of you who are happy to swallow the stuff, fair enough; for me - no thanks.
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As with many things, the key is moderation. Copper occurs naturally in the earth so you probably have it in your soil anyway, meaning it's not a contaminant unless you add such huge quantities the balance changes. It's also not a 'heavy' metal. You will be swallowing it anyway - whether you like it or not - and if you didn't, you would suffer health problems in much the same way you would if you had too much of it.
I agree with the issues of environmental pollution and the drive on that would be to improve mining practices since it will always be important to extract copper (it is used so widely in many industries - a great conductor, vital to many chemical reactions etc.).
If there were a better way to prevent peach leaf curl, I'd be happy to evaluate the alternatives but beyond keeping peach trees under cover, I'm not aware of one?
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On shouldn;t ignore issues like toxicities. But has anyone actually foudn out whether a surface spray is absorbed into the tree or fruit?
the same toxicities can be claimed for, say, selenium (a classic tv dr thingy where someone eats too many brazil nuts).. but at the same time there is enough need for geographical regions to dose selenium to avoid whiet muscle desease or copper for swayback.. if you're growing crops in the same regions....
Even more fun if you explain the horrors of things like potassium spontaneously combusting when put in water or dangers of salt poisoning ......