Seeing gooseberries, white plaque on berries, gardeners, faced with this problem for the first time, give up in bewilderment. Yes, it’s a shrub disease called powdery mildew. At first, the coating is less noticeable: on the berries and leaves you can see an almost invisible "frost".
These are spores of a fungal disease that grow and affect the plant more and more. If the bush is not treated, the white coating becomes more expressive and gathers in whole fluffy flakes, hitting berries and leaves. Then it changes in color - it turns brown with black dots (fruit bodies of mushrooms). The shrub begins to lose its shoots - they dry, the berries crumble. The following summer, the disease progresses even more, as the spores multiply more intensively, and as a result, the plant dies.
What to do if the fruits of gooseberry are covered with a white coating of powdery mildew?
If, after examining the gooseberry, you noticed a white coating on the berries only in the initial stage, it is necessary to take the necessary measures to stop the development of the fungal disease. At the initial stage (as in our case), the best way is to spray. The active substances for this purpose can be ordinary household soap and copper sulfate.
Take 20 g of copper sulfate and 150 g of laundry soap in 10 liters of water.
It is better to breed
copper sulfate in not too hot water. Pour thoroughly mixed mixture into a prepared soap solution.
Laundry soap can be grated. When spraying, special attention should be paid to areas affected by spores. To prevent the occurrence of the disease, it is advisable to spray completely the gooseberry (white coating in this case does not appear at all),
as well as the soil around it.
Gooseberries are inherently unpretentious shrubs, but they need to carry out prophylaxis against fungal diseases regularly, every spring. If we talk about currants, the spores of fungi often affect its leaves and young shoots, but gooseberries are damaged berries: they wrinkle, dry and fall off. If the bush is running and your gooseberry is white, the plaque on the berries is already clearly distinguishable, you need to act immediately. All shoots that are severely affected by mushrooms should be cut and burned. Do not be afraid that the bush will not give you fruit this year. But you will save him from an insidious disease - powdery mildew.
Disease Prevention
To prevent raid on berries next summer, carefully treat the shrub with the above mixture in early spring or use special ready-made preparations for spraying - Cumulus, Tiovit Jet or Vectra.
You can purchase them at any hardware store or supermarket.
For prevention, start spraying the plant at the moment when the first young leaves appeared. Treat the selected preparation not only young shoots, but also the earth around the shrub itself. The second spraying should be carried out during the flowering period, the third - during the formation of the ovary. When berries ripen, use more gentle preparations for prevention.
If you follow our recommendations, your gooseberry will be healthy, a white coating on the berries will not bother you, and you will definitely collect the crop!