I have a tea rose in my yard (an antique tea, Devoniensis, shrub form not the climber) that’s always been a magnet for any and all powdery mildew. It’s always been covered with the stuff. I tolerate it (tho I use any fungicides) cuz I love the flowers.
Despite being an avid coffee drinker, earlier this year I started having some green tea. I’ve been dumping the used green tea at the base of the Devoniensis (dumped at the base of the rose, not on the foliage). Now the rose is having little to no problem with mildew. It’s too big a change to be my imagination, and the constancy of the mildew in the past excludes weather differences. The tea is the only difference I can account for.
Anecdotal evidence of one is a pretty weak case. But I’m of course thinking anything that helps deal with mildew that isn’t a fungicide is interesting for grapes…at least for Pinot where green tea flavors work well . Am I off my rocker?
I’ve heard green tea can be used as a fungicide for instance soaking feet in it. Going up through the roots and affecting the plants that way doesn’t seem to follow to me though. But I’m no biologist.
I’m drinking the tea…I dump the tea leaves (and a bit of rinse water) at the base of the rose. And I agree that affecting the mildew via the roots seems unlikely.
I have a four year old rosemary plant that goes through the same misery when I bring it in for the winter. I also drink green tea. I’ll do a little research and report back. There is no presence of mildew right now though, so I can only do it on an as needed basis.
It includes the min, max and avg temp for each day. It doesn’t include the amount of time at the max (or min)…but the avg daily temp is a different spin on that same question. You could look at the temps for each day to get that data…but quite a pain to do that. I’d probably write a program to scrape the data from the website if I had to.
We would spray quite a bit of stinging nettle when I was at maysara. And I would like to get back into that groove, if possible, with my growers, but I think it could make sense that the slowly degrading tea leaves leave some anti oxidant residue around the plant. Fun stuff.
Starting in April each month had some days in there that would have killed powdery mildew. I am not sure if that would have been enough to explain what you saw.
I just have a hard time with the idea that there was a correlation between the green tea and the pm.
. Am I off my rocker?