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Have you anytime noticed some of your tomatoes at their ends look like these – like blackish brown patch with flattening at the end. This Rot is called Tomato Blossom End Rot (BER) disease. In todays Article we will look into How to easily prevent or treat this blossom end rot disease in tomato plants.
Before I list out the remedies that really work, we will try to know the reasons or causes of this Blossom end rot disease in tomatoes.
The main
reason for this problem is lack of calcium:
Either calcium deficient soil or poor absorption of calcium from the
soil or Soil PH issues not allowing the absorption of nutrients.
So How do you treat this BER? If you think the soil is deficient in calcium, you might just think of supplementing this calcium by crushed or powdered eggshells or even calcium tablets or similar stuff. This type of application should be used for prevention of the disease and not for the treatment as this cannot happen instantly, because the plant simply cannot suck calcium from the soil as soon as you add it.
So, How to Stop this or Prevent this. Remember Always Prevention is better than cure. I conducted one simple experiment. I used my magic foliar spray solution on all my tomato plants once every 15 days and I kept one tomato plant as a control and did not spray anything on this plant. And this plant as you can see developed blossom end rot in tomatoes. The plants who got their calcium and other nutrients through foliar spray never developed this problem. I will let you know the recipe for this magic foliar spray solution now.
Also other points to remember to prevent this problem are:
Sowing seeds on right time. Just at the end of Spring is the perfect time to sow tomato seeds. Thats in feb or march first week.
Well now you can checkout the recipe for the foliar spray liquid to treat tomato blossom end rot problem. I will quickly list out the ingredients one by one and quickly explain the benefit of each of these components.
1. Water: Nothing to explain about this universal solvent. We will formulate this recipe for 1 liter of water.
2. Milk: You can use skimmed milk or if available Raw milk is best. You can even use spoilt milk, butter milk or stuff like that. Use it with lower than 20 percent dilution in water that is 1:5 dilution. So you can add about 100 ml or 200 ml milk to our universal solvent. Milk is not only a source of calcium, but also an antifungal for treatment of powdery mildew and blossom end rot disease on tomato and other vegetable plants. It also kills many plant viruses like tobacco mosaic virus. In place if milk you can add 1 liter of a special water. Yes that’s special calcium rich water for plants. It s nothing but the left over water after you hard boil few eggs. The egg shells release a lot of calcium into this water during boiling.
3. Epsom Salt that’s magnesium sulfate which is a greatest source of magnesium and sulfur. This is easily available at a gardening store or at your local pharmacist and even online. So the dosage is max 5 gms or little lesser than a teaspoon per 1 liter of water.
4. Then the Most important ingredient for adding the major NPK elements into the foliar spray is COMPOST TEA. So, how do you make compost tea? Its really simple. Just Add a handful of decomposed manure or compost like cowdung powder or vermicompost per liter of water. You can make your own quantity of 2 liters or 5 liters depending on your garden size. Allow this to brew for atleast 1 week. Make sure you stir this atleast once every 24 hours to oxygenate this mix till 1 week. Then strain out the liquid using a cloth and use this liquid. I shall make a detailed video some other time on how to use some simple gadgets like an aquarium air pump to quickly make your compost tea.
Well, For now, Once the compost tea is ready, you should dilute this like 1:5 in water and then add about 1 liter to the above solution. Normally if you are using only the compost tea as a foliar spray, you need to use 1:10 dilution. But here we are making a 2.1 liter solution in total. I Hope you got my point!
That’s it, mix it thoroughly and load the spray bottle or use your electric sprayer or whatever and foliar feed your plants. Spray very early in the morning or late in the evening because leaf stomatas are well opened at this period so that absorption happens at its best.
