Cure for early blight.

[PdxMatos]

I have found a very effective treatment against early blight. I figured I'd share it here for reference.
For the past 2 years I've gotten early blight throughout my garden and struggled to treat it.

So this year, when it showed up I went through the scientific literature on it. I found This paper on using compost tea
and
This paper on salicylic acid

As neither were a complete cure, I decided to combine the two approaches.

First I cut off all the infected leaves right up to the stem. I also removed any leaves that I saw were in direct contact with an infected leaf.

Then I made up some non-aerated compost tea, diluted it 5:1 with filtered water and very thoroughly sprayed all of the leaves, the leaves of all adjacent plants. I did this during the day. Normally you don't want water on the leaves especially in the heat of the day because it gives microbes a chance to grow, but in this case that's the whole point.

Following the second paper, I created a root drench with dissolved aspirin in water. I used alka seltzer tablets to deliver the aspirin as these dissolve much better into water. I added 1 tablet to a gallon of water and pored this onto the soil at the base of the plant. (While the rate from the paper corresponds to 1 alka seltzer tablet per 2 gallons of water, I doubled it because I was applying the compost tea solution at the same time, and I figured the excess falling off the leaves would dilute it)

It's now 5 days later, and no signs of any further infection. Photos of the happy plants. (You can see the missing leaves at the base)