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Old August 6, 2018   #36
b54red
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Alabama
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I have been dealing with them for 40 years in the same garden spot. Building up your soil with lots of organic matter and mulching heavily is probably the best thing you can do for your soil but it takes time to reduce their numbers. Nematodes thrive in dry sandy soil which is what happens when most of the organic matter is used up. I have tried the bleaching thing and since I am a proponent of using it for certain disease issues it doesn't work too well in the soil. At best it helps for a couple of weeks but then things move back in and the bad things move back in faster than the good things. A friend of mine who is a chemist and a gardener uses the diluted bleach spray when he has problems on his tomatoes but thinks that using it in the soil could be detrimental to the soil due to salts forming as the bleach reacts in the soil.

Your best bet for long term nematode fighting is to use resistant varieties but even they can sometimes be affected if the problem is bad enough. Those roots in the first picture look like my cucumbers and squash did when I pulled them a week or two ago.

Bill
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