Keeping a tight rein on powdery mildew

I was wrong in my last post. I thought my garden had reached its peak and it was all downhill from here.

This week in the garden

That was because I feared the threat of powdery mildew and what it did to my cucurbits last year. This year though, forewarned is forearmed and I've been keeping right on top of it. I'm watering most days when it doesn't rain (particularly in the morning now, as I've heard that watering in the evening increases slug damage, and also aiming the hose at the soil near the roots and avoiding wetting the leaves as much as possible). I've also been pulling off all leaves with any signs of it, and so far it's not spread much, and the cucurbit patch looks like this.

Squash and cucumbers growing along the ground

I think I should probably have them up on canes, but I've run out of canes, so they're crawling across the grass instead. I know from last year that grass loves having cucurbits climbing all over it and grows long and green and healthy under them, so the only problem this is creating is the big mow I'll need at the end of the season.
Powdery mildew looks like this:

If you leave it, it will eventually spread to cover the whole leaf in powdery, white mildew and then every leaf on your susceptible plant, like this:

Then this:

I am currently controlling it by ripping off the leaves I find it on. I figure, so long as I leave each plant with at least 70% of its leaves, I'm doing more good than harm by removing affected leaves. Alternatively you can spray them with neem oil, but I find that less effective than ripping the affected leaves off (I should really be cutting them off carefully with scissors, as you don't want to shake them and get spores everywhere). Once you've removed the leaves, you need to put them in the bin or the garden waste that the council collects, as if you put them in your compost, you'll just infect your compost and any plants you put it on. I'll probably try neem oil as a last ditch attempt once the powdery mildew's taken hold, but, based on last year, I think at most it will make it spread more slowly, not stop it.
The cucurbits are finally beginning to produce decent sized fruits. I ate an undersized cucumber last week.

And this week they're bigger than the cucumbers you get in the shops already, so Greek salad of mainly tomato and cucumber for me for lunch.

My courgettes are getting there as well.

Monty Don says we're too pick them as soon as they're ready as they become marrow-sized in the blink of an eye. I think I'm going to leave this one another couple of days though, as it's the only one that hasn't been eaten by slugs or just fallen off, so I want it to be big enough to provide me with a meal's worth of courgette by itself.
I also have my first red tomato, although absolutely all the rest are green. I don't know why this one decided to go for it on its own, although I'm planning to eat it soon in case it's the only one I get (I've had tomato disasters before).

I don't even know if it's gardener's delight or moneymaker, as my tomato patch is far too much of a jungle to tell which stem comes from which plant and the labels are in any case buried beneath mounds of foliage.