It looks like our vegetable garden is starting to get a white powdery mildew on some of the plants.  It is important to us that our garden is organic, so I didn’t want to use traditional fungicides with all their toxic chemicals.  So I looked online for an organic solution for our white powdery mildew problem.  I was very happy to find a simple organic way to handle the problem.

Growveg.com has an excellent blog post on using a 40% milk and 60% water solution that you spray on the plants.  We have squash and cucumber plants which are very susceptible to getting white powdery mildew. First I trimmed off all the mildewed leaves and put the leaves in a bag and dispose of in the garbage. You do not want to compost these leaves.

Then I took a regular plastic spray bottle and put the water and milk mixture in it.  Supposedly it’s the protein in the milk that you need, so it doesn’t matter if you use low-fat or full-fat milk.  I used full-fat organic cows milk from the grocery store, and sprayed the front and back side of the leaf, totally saturating the leaf.  It says that it works best when used  as a preventive measure.  I’m gonna cross my fingers and see what happens.  Also, I worried that it would smell like sour milk after a while, but there doesn’t seem to be a smell at all.