Hey! Happy to talk Stargus:
We discovered it in 2023 when we were having an outbreak of Phytopthora fruit blight on our eggplant and a little on our peppers (which were in the same field as the eggplant) and tomatoes. We consulted with Steve Bogash from Marrone and sent in samples to Penn State of the eggplant. Penn State said there was no evidence of pathogens in the roots (soil borne) but on the fruit itself, which I guess was a better outcome than on the roots. The Italian eggplant were for sure hit the hardest, which is why we have switched to only growing asian eggplant (Orient Express and Turkish Delight), which fared better. So once we were aware of the problem, we began tank mixing Stargus and Regalia in our typical copper spray applications on Tomatoes. We only sprayed Stargus and Regalia on the peppers which didn't have as much evidence of the phytopthora. (We also did other cultural controls on the eggplant like culling every fruit and blossom in trash bags, and sprayed the heck out of it with JetAg 5). We also sprayed our Butternut once before they vined out. We continued on to have a successful pepper, tomato, and butternut season in 2023.
Seeing how well Stargus and Regalia helped the tomatoes and peppers deal with the stress of phytopthora, we decided to preemptively include it in our spray program for 2024 for those same crops:
- We sprayed the peppers and eggplant once with a tank mix of Stargus and Regalia mid June
- We sprayed our butternut once with a tank mix of Stargus and Regalia late June
- We included Stargus and Regalia in any of our copper applications, mostly for tomatoes every 7-10 day intervals, and also on our two successions of cucumbers one time each.
We absolutely going to use it in the same manner this year, and are also going to consider using it in the drip for our onions and chard. We deal with chard that yellows quickly, and even with good fertilizing and varieties, it just peters out so quickly for us. Brandon our seed rep from Johnny's told us it may be a root/soil disease that is affecting it, so this year we will probably use Stargus and Actinovate through the drip for that. We also might run Stargus through our onion drip.
Of course it is difficult to always say the efficacy of a certain product, especially since 2024 was such a dry year, great for keeping diseases down etc. But we will continue to use it as we believe in those kinds of products that promote the good bacteria/fungi/microorganisms and are biologicals. When we were dealing with the Phytophthora, Steve Bogash recommended using oxidate on the peppers and tomatoes as well, which had minimal incidence of it, and we felt like we wanted to steer away from killing all the healthy bacteria on those plants. But that's just how we tend to lean in terms of sprays and farming mentality. Hope this helps!
- Steph