Science and Practice in Farm CultivationBuckman, James
Science
Science and Practice in Farm Cultivation
Buckman, James
Agriculture
9-12. _Botrytis_, _&c._ (Mildew).—Under this head we include a multitude
of epiphytes, to which the terms mildew, mealdew, mehlthau (Germ.) are
applicable. They appear to the naked eye as patches of white dust or
meal on the leaves and stems of the affected plants. With the microscope
we see that they are beautifully-organized plants, having a kind of
rootlet (mycelium) or spawn entering the tissues of the living plants on
which they grow, and delicate pedicels supporting spores at the
externally visible portion of the plant. The botrytis of the potato and
turnip, the erysiphe or oïdium of the hop, vine, and other plants, are
only different forms of mildew, which in some shape or another will be
found on most plants. That these attack living tissues is quite certain;
but in the case of the potato, the turnip, and the vine, there is reason
to believe that they result, to a very considerable extent, from
diseased action in their tissues. For example: the botrytis of the
potato seems to attack a crop much over-cultivated, on the approach of
wet and cold nights after a prosperous growth in warm sunshine. So, the
oïdium seems to us to be most abundant on renewed growth after a season
of dry weather. Again: mildew in turnips is sure to follow that check
which a long season of dry weather brings after a prosperous and
vigorous growth. All these circumstances at least show how these attacks
are favoured by the conditions which bring disease. So much, indeed, is
this the case, that we found, upon experimenting with some cucumbers in
a warm stove, that as long as we regularly watered the plants and gave
them the requisite air, they kept healthy; but, by neglecting these
conditions for a few days, we obtained mildew with the greatest
certainty.
The remedies against mildew are—to obtain as healthy a growth as
possible, and to maintain this with as great regularity as
circumstances will permit. Of late years, both the mildew of the vine
and the hop have been treated with flowers of sulphur. Dusting the
affected hop-leaves with sulphur certainly arrests the mildew in an
incredibly short time; and we found that by dusting sulphur from a fine
sieve on our cucumber plants, the disease was immediately arrested in
its progress. We therefore look upon this as an invaluable remedy in
these states of mildew, whether occurring on the vine, the hop, the
turnip, the cucumber, or on other plants, as we have frequently seen it
in hothouses—a circumstance which shows the near affinity of all those
forms of epiphytes, which, perhaps, after all, only vary with the
variations in the structure and economy of the different plants on which
they occur.
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