Pesticides and fungicides for home use

General Fruit Growing
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Hi all,
we have a backyard garden with about 35 muscat grape vines, and 10 raised beds (4’x10’).
We just grow for ourselves and friends. We always do tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, hot peppers, potatoes, lettuces, beets, radishes. We also have an apple tree, a couple pear trees, raspberries, blackberries, rhubarb, strawberries, hops, and figs.
We preserve a lot of stuff (pickled, salsa, tomato sauce), and I make hot sauce, beer, and wine.

Some friends are commercial farmers in Niagara and have gifted me some fungicides and pesticides.
For fungicides I have Pristine, Kumulus, Manzate, and Switch.
For pesticides I have Altacor.

I mainly need to control mildew, black rot, and japanese beetles.
I’ve been rotating through the various fungicides to prevent developing resistance.

I like Pristine best as it seems to cover the most possible issues. I usually mix manzate and kumulus together. I don’t use switch often. I only have some small tupperware containers of these, but they will last me for years.
Altacor does wonders for japanese beetles.

Anyway, I’ve looked online and tried to do some math myself for application rates. It’s hard for me to convert from area to volume based numbers. I just want to make sure I’m in the right ballpark for spraying.
I use an 8L/2G pump sprayer.
for Pristine, I’ve been using 1g/L (one thread here seemed to indicate closer to 0.5g/L was recommended)
Manzate 2g/L
Kumulus 4g/L
Altacor 0.4g/L
I just am going through and misting the grapes, tomatoes, peppers, squash, zucchini, hops, cucumbers, and beets.
Sometimes I will spray the apple and pears, but they are too large for me to get at effectively.

I only spray every 2-4 weeks, May-August, depending on rain. I usually wear a wide brimmed hat, long sleeve shirt, and long pants when spraying. I go shower right after spraying and we stay out of the garden for 24 hours after.

Just wondering if my ratios look ok, and if I should be wearing more PPE like mask and goggles. Don’t want to scare the neighbours ::slight_smile: I do make sure no one else is outside when spraying.

I’m in the Niagara Region, 7a.

Thanks for any input.

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I’m not great at math involving the metric system and don’t use any of the materials you mention besides Pristine, which I measure by volume and not weight and for 25 gallon batches.

What sticks out for me is that I think you are over spraying. The crops you mention shouldn’t require a set spray schedule in my opinion and the poisons should be used to target specific pests, most often after they’ve been diagnosed. Certain wine grapes may require some kind of schedule of repeated summer sprays to stop rot, but other grapes shouldn’t need more than two spring sprays of myclobutanil to give you your crop.

I don’t need very much intervention to protect vegetables. army worms and loopers can be controlled with BT which are the main problem with the cabbage family. I won’t spray squash with any insecticide once they are blooming to protect the bees so my zucchini has to be replanted at least once to have crop throughout the season- big deal. Most winter squash is fine without spray as are tomatoes, although the season can be cut short by early blight here. For that I use resistant varieties, spray with copper soap (or chlorathalinal) until first tomatoes are well formed and plant a later crop after the first one to keep the brandywine types coming. Country Taste, Sun Gold and Sun Chocolate keep producing until frost without replanting.

Another thing, in small plantings resistance is much less a problem than when a single crop covers multiple acres.

Commercial growers often know very little about what is needed in small plantings where pristine produce isn’t essential.

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Thanks for the input Alan.
I definitely don’t want to be spraying more than needed. Here in Niagara it’s quite humid in the summer.
In previous years, I did less or even no spraying, but then our tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and grapes were all suffering from either downy or powdery mildew by July, and crops were severely affected.
This year I started spraying the beets too, we had lots of browning leaves which was a fungal infection, and the sprays cleared it up well.

This summer has been hotter than usual, over 30 C (86F) for weeks at a time, and it’s been humid (but not raining much). So I’ve been spraying a bit more as a preventative, but even still have some mildew forming.

I’d love to spray less often, just not sure I can. Or maybe my ratios of chemicals are too low, which is why they aren’t lasting as long? I don’t know.

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FYI. Altacor label says for commercial use only. Not for residential use. It also says “may not be applied within 100 feet of a water body”.

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Definitely no body of water within 100 ft, other than my swimming pool.
I generally only do altacor once or maybe twice a year, just to control the japanese beetles once they start showing up.
This year I did a spray on July 15 as I saw several dozen in the grapes, and they were virtually gone within 2 days.

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Just fyi manzate has a very long pre-harvest interval for grapes (66 days), so hopefully you’ve stopped using it already. Strangely the PHI for cucumbers is 5 days…

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I do track the PHI for all of them. Grapes here are usually late Sept to early October, and I last did manzate a few weeks ago, so should be ok.

Ty for reminder.

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Hmmm. as a matter of fact this is the first year where curly parsley has succumbed to mildew on my property, but it was only a container plant and parsley in the ground is still healthy without spray. No problems with my grapes.

You are up by the lakes, right? Do other gardeners in your area have the same issues? Regions vary a great deal but you seem to require more spray input than any forum members I’ve heard of so I do think you should find out if your issues are common there if you don’t already know. That is where master gardener programs can be useful because every area has a community of serious gardeners in NY that you can get in touch with through the horticulturist at your cooperative extension.

I have clients right on the ocean with vegetable gardens that don’t require you input. I can’t see how your humidity would be greater.