Powdery Mildew on my Climbing Rose (organic treatment)

Healthy Flowers and Flourishes - I love the scent of this rose

Spring has sprung!

How I do love walking through my garden, now that everything is in bloom and or already grows veggies and fruit.

Smelling the citrus flowers and the roses.

Personally, I have no understanding for people who grow roses that have no scent.

Why would you go out of your way to care for this difficult thorny plant when you don't even get a scent out of it?

Today was rose trimming day as my 'Flowers and Flourishes" were in ueber-bloom.

The temps are already pretty high and they were fading fast.  I decided to extend their amazing scent by cutting and enjoying them inside.

Powdery Mildew on climbing rose

While snipping, I noticed that my climber rose was diseased with powdery mildew.

Of course, one can bring out the guns and kill the ecosystem in ones garden or research a more organic approach.

From the research, I understood that the key was to change the ph to more acidic, making the plant inhabitable for the mildew and 'starve' it.

There were a few recipes floating around on the internet (milk or vinegar) but my abundance of kombucha, made me try to combat the powdery mildew with .... errr... kombucha.

You can use apple cider vinegar or raw milk instead. The ratio is always the same:

1TB of acidic medium to 1.5 l of water.

Who would have thought, I end up spraying my diseased rose bush with a kombucha-water mix?



"Nature never says one thing and wisdom another." Decimus Junius Juvenalis