I have found a lot of success with thyme oil, and like so many others someone put a bottle of neem oil in my hand early on. I am wondering if you plan to use any oils for fungus or insect control this year and specifically why that one?
i've not used any sprays on plants here in many years. one plant that was supposed to be a cabbage plant grew up as something else and it was loaded with grey aphids so i pulled the plant and buried it. the rest of the time i value my beneficial bug populations more than i value a single plant or planting. instead i try to grow resistant plants (for squash that would be buttercup and crosses that have come up since we started) and also try to grow a few perennial plants near any bare dirt garden space so that the beneficial bugs have places to hang out during the times when the soil is bare. personally i don't like bare soil at all and would like to put in cover crops through the winter but i am only a helper here so the owner (aka Mom
) has to be worked around as best i can for organic production. that means she likes bare dirt gardens because they look "tidy" (to me they look dead). oh well.
life goes on, even with the fact that i can't improve soils as much as i'd like the gardens here gradually improve by the continued additions of worm compost and any other organic materials i can scrounge or harvest (green manure from a green manure patch (alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil are good N providers along with whatever other trace minerals they bring up from down deeper).
we also started with clay in most of the vegetable garden areas. it takes time to bring those up to regular garden soil standards. the worms in a new garden are almost non-existant but by about the 5th year of amending and working in a new space and burying organic materials and innoculating with worms i start to see a population get established (most of the worms i transplant are not natives and don't survive our winters - and adult worms in general don't usually do all that great when transplanted so it takes a while to get going). i do have some native worms in my small scale worm farm but they take a lot longer to reproduce than the composting worms i use (which are also happily at home in some dirt in the containers so it isn't a normal worm composting setup).
to get back to the first part though, my goal with growing things is to grow what we actually will eat (Mom is picky so i grow things she will eat). this limits my choices quite a bit, but we do ok. my other constraints are that there are so many choices out there that if some plant doesn't work because of disease or bug issues i can usually find something else that will work instead. so to keep things simple and to avoid sprays of any kind i'll grow things and see how they do and if they go ok they can be added to the rotation as long as Mom will eat them. i also have the goal of being natural and simple as possible so sprays and things that need a lot of finicky care won't be grown again (like with all the raccoons around here we don't even try to grow sweet corn - we don't eat a lot of it anyways so it isn't a big loss - instead i like to grow a lot of beans
).
and like i've said about the tomatoes already, i don't mind that they get late blight each season because by the time it gets bad enough the season is mostly done and we have enough tomatoes (20-40lbs a plant is normal for us on the beefsteaks).
