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Old June 7, 2017   #42
shule1
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bower View Post
shule, what do you do for 'zapping'?

I had some mites starting to get into my garlic when I harvested last year, so I tried several different treatments (although also only planted the most pristine of the lot).

I am a bit disappointed with my bulbils this spring. Two of the containers seemed to get ice dams in them over the winter (ie didn't drain well when frozen and rained on, for sure) and there's little or nothing coming up. Also disappointed to see only about 40 of the 76 rounds I planted. Maybe the long hard winter. I guess I should be glad, I'm selecting for the toughest of the bunch.
I experimentally use a Z4EX with copper pipes (cheap pipes from The Home Depot; I save the nicer pipes that came with the product for other purposes, since zapping seeds/bulbs corrodes them a lot faster). I fill a quart jar less than half-way full with garlic and then add enough water to submerge them. I put the copper pipes (wires attached) in the water (and make sure they don't touch). I zap them for 15 minutes per frequency (there are 3). Then, I dry the garlic and store it in a dry place for a few months or more, and then plant.

If I'm zapping tomato or other vegetable seeds, I don't add as much water (maybe a couple inches). I just did that because I had a lot of garlic. If you add too much water, it weakens the electric current). Half full is probably weaker than two or three inches of water.

I have no idea what effect zapping would have on mites, but it seems to be potentially effective against disease (but I need more observation, still). I am growing some tomatoes that were purposefully from fruits infected with anthracnose; so, we'll see if the fruit gets anthracnose again (so far, the plants look very healthy; no spots.) But then, I am growing them in soil that had watermelons with anthracnose last year; so, if they do get it, it's not surprising (and it doesn't mean the zapping didn't remove the anthracnose). I'm mostly testing to see if they don't get it (to test people's ideas on acquired immunity in plants). My hypothesis is that if a plant experiences a disease and passes it to its seeds, and if the disease is then removed from the seeds, that the new plants may have increased tolerance to it, due to acclimatization and exposure of the plant's ancestors).

Last edited by shule1; June 7, 2017 at 01:48 AM.
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