On 23/05/2018 19:20, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 23/05/18 09:53, David Rance wrote:

The ironic thing is that my empty carton of Dithane (active ingredient
Mancozeb, which is where I started this thread) was reserved for amateur
gardeners. Thanks to the EU, no longer!

I'm not quite sure how it came to be banned.

Overuse in Belgian orchards vaguely rings a bell. The EU technical
report when it got put into Appendix I is online:

http://www.furs.si/law/EU/ffs/eng/an...R/Mancozeb.doc

I still can't see why it got banned after a quick flash read.

Further to my misery, I discovered this morning that anthracnose has now
spread to my blackcurrants! Oh, malheur! I'm coming back to the UK
today!

Get used to it! Don't worry about diseases on food crops - we have to
protect the environment. The daft thing is that amateurs use minute
amounts of chemicals compared with the agricultural industry. And if
they are trying to protect amateurs from poisoning themselves through
stupidity when using chemicals, well, have these legislators never heard
of the Darwin Awards?!

I think there is some merit in banning the ones which could result in no
birds or no bees or are known to cause cancer. Where it gets tricky are
the ones which get abused by commercial crop growers and banned for all
uses despite the fact that they are fine to use on ornamental plants.

DDT is quite tricky in this respect in that it is well tolerated by
mammals, incredibly lethal to mosquitos but also bad news for birds.

Many older OPs the redspider has evolved fast enough to survive so you
need to use something else anyway (ideally alternating between two). I
have never found the organic control of them especially useful. YMMV

Neither can I entirely eliminate mealy bug from my collection.

I wonder if there will be a ban on the sale of Nicotiana tabacum seeds
one day if anyone starts making their own insecticidal spray from it. ;-)

If you extract it right there is more than a human lethal dose of
nicotine from a packet of cigarettes. Gardeners did used to get poisoned
themselves by nicotine extract back in the days when it was on sale.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown