What is everyone's preferred method against PM?

Nice. I just bought a pound of the dried stuff online. The recipe I am using is one of the first ones that was posted in the original horsetail link on here.

100g dried (or 1 kg fresh) into 2 liters of water, let soak 24 hrs. Then boil 20 min, let cool, and strain. This part is the concentrate. Keeps in the fridge for up to 30 days, and is mixed up at 10% dilution with water. I'm about to go do my first application right now.

oh wait, here's the link. http://forum.seeddepot.nl/showthread.php?1695-How-to-prevent-and-treat-powdery-mildew-with-horsetail-tea

shitdammit, I am now seeing that it says to leave the cooked portion to sit for 2 days afterwards... the post has a little bit of conflicting info, like it was copied and recopied or something.

Eric A, what did you do for it??

edit: I see you've let your sit for a couple days. Looks like I am as well. Glad I came on here to reread the recipe!

edit edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4KLt6R90VlQ This guy just charges it it sounds like? I dunno, but he is my new hero.

edit edit edit: after doing more research on biodynamics, it seems most people spray it at a 1 part tea, 9 part water ratio.

I'm doing the same method as you stated. Although I cut it in half. The reason for this was I could only find the horsetail in capsul form at my Health food store. Total gram weight was close to 50. So I just did a half batch. Going to apply today. I do love how it smells.....feels so much better to me to be using a natural method rather than chemical. I kinda freak out with the way my leaves look after I've drenched them with GC.....not pretty.

I have had my HT sitting in a mason jar in the fridge for 3 days. I'm going to use 1 part HT to 9 parts water in my sprayer and give it a go. I like the added silica benefit as well. Kind of a foliar feed with a preventative kick.

Lets hope for the best brothers and sisters. Thanks again all for your help.

Nuff Respect Rising Moon. Cool Runnings.

Yeah, it does smell good. I let mine sit down in my garage for a full day so far... pretty chilly. Just moved it to the fridge. Sweeter smelling already. Gonna start spraying tomorrow night.... will spray my outdoor leafy greens, too, just to help build them up. That one guy in the video was crushing it with his veggies... no PM at all. And you can pretty much use it all the way up until harvest. Equisetum for the win. Positive thoughts guys!

Cool guys. Glad to see others are trying it out. DEEP ORGANICS!!!

Check out Mountain Rose Herbs, they have really great herbs for good prices, all organic too!

mixed mine up tonight, but again, mine is the powdered herb...in the fridge now....i plan to run it through a filter first because it has a very fine sediment that is like a serious pigment when dried...but i will filter, then dilute....

I tried milk + water about a week and a half ago, so far so good, had to respray 5 days after as well. hope this works

i used the powder 7 days ago sprayed 3 days in a row it left my girls covered in white residue i washed it off with my regular foliar spay now they are looking great and shooting like crazy and no more pm.i went to harbor side in Oakland and picked up some clones and the Chernobyl's that i got were covered in pm by day three i tried organocide serenade and neem oil with no results but this stuff is looking good so far thanks for the help guys

It's been a few days since my last post.
i applied my mix to the entire garden. One part HT to 9 parts h20.

I do believe it is helping. I see no more tell tale raised bumps where I had before. No sign of pm at the moment.
The plants really do seem to like it.
I haven't seen any of the white residue that lopezrotts reported. So far so good.

I sprayed with lights on and didn't notice any burn.

What is everyone's preferred spraying method....lights on or off?
I felt lights on we're the right call because I drenched the leaves and really wanted them to soak it in and dry off. I don't want excess moisture hanging around my plants. I did not spray the flowers.

Good idea? Or bad? Any thoughts? I'd like to learn.
Thanks again Rising Moon.

Nugs, have you any success with your horsetail mix?

I believe Lopez was using the powder, hence the white residue. If you use the dried, shredded HT it doesn't have any sort of residue.

I've been doing mine for a few days as well with pretty good success. I was just telling Nugs this morning that my plants just seem happier overall. Must be the silicates that are in there... Just make sure you use a dash of biodegradable soap in there so it helps to coat better.

btw, best to foliar spray within an hour of lights going off. I admittedly did one spray right before lights off (was getting ready for bed myself), and the plants seemed fine with it. I veg under T5 for what it's worth.

i didnt read evey post so im not sure if someone has mentioned it already, the best shit for PM is called "greencure"....its amazing! good luck

hey everyone.....

i sprayed my cabinet girls yesterday with a 25% solution, they are 2 1/2 weeks flowering, and a day later they look great....they did not have any visible PM yet, and hope the HT keeps it that way....i am going in right now to treat my whole flower room containing 5 plants between 2 1/2 to 5 weeks flower......2 of the plants have an active infection....i will use the 25% on them too.....

serenade did not cut it, i had more PM 4 days after treatment......
the best treatment i have found for plants around 50 days (to get them to finish clean) is 1T baking soda, 1tsp neem, and 1tsp dishsoap in a gal r/o.....it will fry the pistils back, but works really well, and usually lasts until harvest between day 60-64......

....the hardest part is keeping them clean from day 14 (green cure used up till that point) to day 50....serenade is not cutting it, and oxidate not much better.......i will try lemon juice next if HT does not cut it.....

....but i have high hopes it will work, and will update here for everyone......

i have ordered specracide immunox to treat all my young clones and seed spring plants....i just can not be fucking with this all summer.....

headed down, wish me luck!...nugs

Good luck. PM can drive you nuts. Looks like you have a good plan worked out. Ive been using GC and Azomax mixed together weekly all the way until week 2 of flower. Haven't had any probs in a little while now. I figured out that taking a cut from a plant and that plant starts flowering and have pm issues, more than likey that cut you took will somepoint in its life with have issues also. Sometimes its just in the strain and will never leave no matter how you treat it. Just gotta toss it

kushking42 said:

its not hydrogen peroxide its dioxide. when i mixed oxidate and greencure the ph remained high. but the orp was lower. ill lower the orp in all my foliar sprays if im concerned with pm. as for the burnt tips, ya they get scorched pretty good at 2 tbsp per gallon. i figure its worth it.

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Hydrogen dioxide is another name for hydrogen peroxide. It's tricky labeling. Hydrogen peroxide =H2O2 ----> 2 oxygen atoms ---> DIoxide. Can't comment on that product because I've never tried it, but it may be really cheap and easy to make yourself. Never tried to source PAA either, so maybe it's not cheap n easy... Who knows...

I've had to struggle with PM. I've thought a couple of times that I had it beat but then it comes back. I've tried baking soda and water, green cure, neem oil, milk and water, and compost tea. I always add some surfactant for foliar spraying - various but could be wet betty, soap or now usually Aloe Vera juice and protekt. All of them were at least a little effective and worked for a while but nothing has gotten rid of it once and for all. Oh, well. I was warned that the greencure could burn the leaves and to mix it at less than what is required on the label (sorry not looking at it now and don't remember what that actually is), but even though I mixed it quite light, I thought that it was still a little hard on the plant and no more functional than a couple of things (compost tea, milk) which don't seem to harm at all and may even help.

To me, the diluted compost tea and diluted milk have seemed to be the best so far for fighting PM. Even then, spraying at least once/week after you've apparently rid yourself of it is needed. To get rid of it, 2 -3 times in a week seems about right. I've thought a couple times that it was gone and then got just a little optimistic/lazy and it comes back. I try to vary what I spray a little but the best go to for me is diluted milk. It is a little bit stinky but completely safe, functional as anything I have found and doesn't reek like serenade or even neem...and I don't have to remember to brew it in advance.

I've cleaned my grow room in between grows with bleach water solution to kill spores. I'll be doing that again. It's not enough by itself so far but on this next grow there will be at least one PM treatment/week from seedling until harvest. Maybe I'll never get it or maybe I will but I'm going to stay on top of it from beginning to end and see if I can finally shed myself of this particular pest...or just learn to live with the need to spray at least once a week...which really may be the answer.

SpicySativa said:

Hydrogen dioxide is another name for hydrogen peroxide. It's tricky labeling. Hydrogen peroxide =H2O2 ----> 2 oxygen atoms ---> DIoxide. Can't comment on that product because I've never tried it, but it may be really cheap and easy to make yourself. Never tried to source PAA either, so maybe it's not cheap n easy... Who knows...

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good to know! the bottom line with using hydrogen dioxide is lowering the oxygen reduction potential. i havent crunched the numbers as for cost effectiveness but it takes about 10x the amount of peroxide to lower the orp of a solution to the same level as oxidate. high Ca foliar helps a lot in battling fungus. i just sprayed the beds with cal carb. my favorite thing to spray til midway through stretch is ph adjusted brix mix with oxidate, ascorbic acid included in the recipe with fungus in mind

I have high hopes for this....three days in, no mildew.....but the best part is the plants love it, and are exceptionally perky with zero pistil fry.....if it continues to do the job, i plan to do a tutorial......i love being able to spray something that smells good, and i don't have to wear any sort of protection.......we may be on to something really good nerds!

But I had also noted in several sources that horsetail is useful as a natural fungicide. I’ve used it successfully as a treatment for black spot and powdery mildew on roses and noticed this year that a few organic supply companies are offering horsetail for that purpose. I add 1 cup of chopped horsetail to 6 cups of boiling water, boil for 5 minutes, then allow the tea to cool overnight. I strain it well and put it in a spray bottle. In damp weather, I spray the roses about every three days.
I surmised that if horsetail is a good plant fungicide, it might also be useful on skin. I first tested it on myself to see what effect it would have on athlete’s foot. I’ve used almost every product on the market only to have the athlete’s foot fungus go away for a while and then return, more bothersome than before.
To make the athlete’s foot soak, I mixed 1 cup of chopped horsetail plant with 4 cups of boiling cider vinegar. I boiled it briefly, then let it steep overnight. I strained the solution into a plastic shoebox. Every morning after showering, I soaked my feet briefly. Within ten days, the tenacious fungus subsided, and it has stayed away permanently.
I next tested horsetail on my father, who is close to being antiherbal: if it grows in the garden and isn’t a vegetable, he’s not interested. A few years back, he showed me his fingernails. One was totally black, and another was about half blackened. “I don’t suppose you have anything herbal for this?” Dad asked. “The doctor says it’s a fingernail fungus and that he’ll eventually have to remove the nails.”
Since then, I’ve learned that this fungus is common, especially in the fingernails and toenails of older people. While there is a medical treatment, it is expensive and often unsuccessful.
I mixed up my horsetail-in-vinegar solution for Dad and put some in a small glass. I encouraged him to soak his fingers for five minutes every night while he watched the evening news.
About ten days later, he called me. “The doctor wants to talk to you,” he said. “He wants to know what you’ve been using on my fingers because the nails are beginning to grow back.”
The nails healed completely, and the fungus has not returned.
Horsetail is, in addition, an interesting landscape plant and well worth including in the garden, but it is quickly invasive. It will grow under walks and out of beds. I grow mine in a five-gallon nursery pot with the bottom cut out. I fill the pot with soil and bury it up to the rim with the plant inside. The depth of the pot keeps the roots from straying.
The plant is said to prefer sandy, moist soil, but I’ve also found it growing in dry, gravelly railroad beds, along highways, and in heavy clay. It will grow in almost any hardiness zone.
Horsetail is a good example of an old folk remedy that doesn’t work for the purposes it’s remembered for yet has some beneficial uses today. It has a place of honor in my medicinal beds. From a distance, on a lazy afternoon, it may resemble stalks of asparagus, ready to be picked.

I just use aerated tap water in a spray bottle with a few drops of neem (much less than directions) and dish soap(emulsifier). Not too much neem or the stomatas will clog and stress the plant out. H202 doesn't work as well. Plus I prefer not to use any chems any where near my girls

nugbuckets said:

I have high hopes for this....three days in, no mildew.....but the best part is the plants love it, and are exceptionally perky with zero pistil fry.....if it continues to do the job, i plan to do a tutorial......i love being able to spray something that smells good, and i don't have to wear any sort of protection.......we may be on to something really good nerds!

But I had also noted in several sources that horsetail is useful as a natural fungicide. I’ve used it successfully as a treatment for black spot and powdery mildew on roses and noticed this year that a few organic supply companies are offering horsetail for that purpose. I add 1 cup of chopped horsetail to 6 cups of boiling water, boil for 5 minutes, then allow the tea to cool overnight. I strain it well and put it in a spray bottle. In damp weather, I spray the roses about every three days.
I surmised that if horsetail is a good plant fungicide, it might also be useful on skin. I first tested it on myself to see what effect it would have on athlete’s foot. I’ve used almost every product on the market only to have the athlete’s foot fungus go away for a while and then return, more bothersome than before.
To make the athlete’s foot soak, I mixed 1 cup of chopped horsetail plant with 4 cups of boiling cider vinegar. I boiled it briefly, then let it steep overnight. I strained the solution into a plastic shoebox. Every morning after showering, I soaked my feet briefly. Within ten days, the tenacious fungus subsided, and it has stayed away permanently.
I next tested horsetail on my father, who is close to being antiherbal: if it grows in the garden and isn’t a vegetable, he’s not interested. A few years back, he showed me his fingernails. One was totally black, and another was about half blackened. “I don’t suppose you have anything herbal for this?” Dad asked. “The doctor says it’s a fingernail fungus and that he’ll eventually have to remove the nails.”
Since then, I’ve learned that this fungus is common, especially in the fingernails and toenails of older people. While there is a medical treatment, it is expensive and often unsuccessful.
I mixed up my horsetail-in-vinegar solution for Dad and put some in a small glass. I encouraged him to soak his fingers for five minutes every night while he watched the evening news.
About ten days later, he called me. “The doctor wants to talk to you,” he said. “He wants to know what you’ve been using on my fingers because the nails are beginning to grow back.”
The nails healed completely, and the fungus has not returned.
Horsetail is, in addition, an interesting landscape plant and well worth including in the garden, but it is quickly invasive. It will grow under walks and out of beds. I grow mine in a five-gallon nursery pot with the bottom cut out. I fill the pot with soil and bury it up to the rim with the plant inside. The depth of the pot keeps the roots from straying.
The plant is said to prefer sandy, moist soil, but I’ve also found it growing in dry, gravelly railroad beds, along highways, and in heavy clay. It will grow in almost any hardiness zone.
Horsetail is a good example of an old folk remedy that doesn’t work for the purposes it’s remembered for yet has some beneficial uses today. It has a place of honor in my medicinal beds. From a distance, on a lazy afternoon, it may resemble stalks of asparagus, ready to be picked.

Click to expand...

This is great. And you are using a higher concentration, too, right? Biodynamics FTW.

i bought the powder, so i went one ounce in a qt of water, in fridge for 24 hrs, then boil for 20 minutes...then i split it into two quart jars and top off with h20......after a day in the fridge i pour it off the sediment into a 1/2 gal mason....when i use it, i cut it in half with h20 again....so i figure it is around 25-30%.....looks about like iced tea color....

Not sure if this was posted before, but it's another recipe... slightly different, and what interests me is the way they let the tea create mold spores. BD #508

http://www.jpibiodynamics.org/sites/default/files/ab_67_screen.pdf

edit: btw, that story about the fingernail fungus is awesome! I have a friend that has been battling it for a long time, and I think was even going in and getting it lasered at one point. Gnarly. Tea is much easier!