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Onion Rot - Update 2007
By roystahl | May 9, 2007
For the last three years I have had a bad problem with onion rot on my precious garlic. Last year I lost 50% of my crop to the disease. I took some garlic and soil sample to a soil lab to get it tested and confirm what I had.
Then after scouring the internet and not liking solutions that included nasty chemicals I found some people saying that you could make a onion tea solution and spread it on the ground. The theory is that the fungus response to the onions goes to attack. When there is no true onion food supply it dies. I added my own twist to this. I had many half rotted garlic and the soil lab said the fungus/mold can not survive temperatures over 130 degrees. So I took some hot water 135-140 degrees and put cleaned garlic cloves, made garlic tea and spread it over most the garden.
I also learned that the fungus/mold is not active under 55 degrees. Last fall I used a soil thermometer and planted garlic 3 weeks later than normal (mid November) when the soil temperature was close to 50 degrees.
So far I am very encouraged by the results. In the area that I had planned on growing garlic and got several garlic tea treatments when the soil temperature was still warm, I am seeing very healthy garlic. In the area that I was forced to use (ok a bit extreme) I planted garlic in an area that had onion rot that year and didn’t get the same level of treatment. Amazingly I am finding bad garlic where I would expect to and luckily this is only a small portion of my crop. It also serves as a good control area since the weather has been drier this year that I could have used as an excuse for the low.
In a few weeks time I should have final results and numbers that will prove to me that there is an organic way to treat onion rot that doesn’t simply require that you don’t plant garlic/onions in the area for 8+ years.
As a side note: One reason I slowed working on plangarden software last year was because I was not happy about my own gardening and wondering what type of gardener am I that have to throw away so much hard work and long waiting for garlic to mature. Now with Plangarden doing so well I am also re-energized to write more of the web-based software and hopefully share my results. I doubt that companies that sell fungicided will be happy to know that you don’t need expensive chemicals to defeat this disease.
Topics: Vegetable Software News |
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