It might sound too good to be true, but it's not. Common baking soda that you can find in any corner shop can be your assistant gardener in organic plant care. When you think about it, just what are you putting on your plants with commercial fertilizers and pesticides? Chemicals that are usually too harsh for the environment, especially if they get into water runoff. With a little research and ingenuity, you can use baking soda to help you in some organic plat care tasks.

Fungicide Spray

Professional and amateur gardeners alike find that the best universal fungicide spay for organic plant care is simply a mixture of baking soda and lightweight horticultural oil or summer oil (the oil makes the baking soda stick to the plant better). The recipe is usually one teaspoon of baking soda to two and a half teaspoons of lightweight summer oil. And there are organic lightweight summer oils, usually made from fish.

This mixture for organic plant care is especially recommended for blackspot and mildew problems in roses. For best results, you need to pick off the infected leaves before spraying. Put those leaves in the garbage and not the compost, as you do not want blackspot or mildew in your soil or compost.

Cornell University did research studies using baking soda and water as a universal fungicide spray and got great results. Use the same recipe mentioned above, just substitute waste for the lightweight summer or horticultural oil. And you don’t have to worry – pretty much all water is organic already.

Gentle Garden Supply Cleaner

It is best to clean all of your supplies for organic plant care before you use them, especially for things like repotting or growing seedlings. You also want to be sure not to spread any diseases to healthy plants if there has been a sick plant in a pot or used by your other tools. A good way to clean all of your gardening supplies is with baking soda and soap.

Before you use chips, stones or broken pottery pieces as drainage in your plants, they should also be washed in a baking soda solution before they are used to line the bottom of a plant pot. When you use baking soda as a cleaner, be sure to rinse well. Some gardeners even wash their hands with baking soda in organic plant care, so to be sure not to spread any chemicals from their hand soap to their plants.