Category Archives: Help! My Plant is Sick!
A Couple of Garden Problems
Looking over the garden this morning after the weekend, I spotted a couple of things going on that will result in replacing a couple of plants around the garden.
This is the first problem I noticed. I saw it when the damage was fresh Saturday morning as well. While it is theoretically possible that there was a weak spot on the stem that the wind snapped, I think that the most likely culprit in this case is a cutworm. Cutworms like to wrap around the stems of young seedlings or transplants and chew them off. That is exactly what this looks like. This pepper plant is done for, at this point. We will be replanting this one tomorrow.
This tomato plant is the worst, although I can see 3 or 4 others with similar symptoms. At first glance, most people would say that the plant is wilting and needs a drink of water. Very tempting response! However, there were three things that made me question that immediate reaction. First, while the plant is wilted, there is no sign of leaf scorch or similar damage that there should have been after the warm weekend. Second, I felt the soil a couple of inches down and in felt moist. If the plant can’t get water out of that soil, then it has some type of root damage, but isn’t yet to the point of scorching. Also, the lower leaves were looking rather yellow, which to me says that the plant has either been getting too much water or it is suffering from too few or too many nutrients.
What I am wondering is if in our concern for keeping the soil moist enough for our germinating seeds, we actually OVER-watered the tomatoes last week. As tempting as it is to put more water on a wilty plant, I’m going to try to hold off the watering and see if they will perk up again. If not, we’ve got some plants in reserve to replace the couple sickly looking plants.
It is theoretically possible that these plants were planted in a localized hot spot due to the compost that we used. I haven’t gotten all the results back yet, but I expect some high numbers. Or…maybe the nitrogen has all been leached out…that also causes yellowing. (But not wilting.) Hmm…
Vegetable Garden Fertilizers & Pesticides
With the gardening season well underway, thanks to the early, warm spring, I think lots of Kansas gardeners are trying their best to make sure that they have a great garden this year, after the dismal year we had last year. As you are getting your garden started, I would encourage you to take extra care in choosing what you apply to your garden. Many of the products that we routinely use for flowers and other ornamentals are not safe to use on your vegetable garden!
It is very tempting to grab that bag of fertilizer or bottle of pesticide that you bought for your lawn or trees or flowers and use it on your vegetable garden. Sometimes, that is okay. Other times, it can be a BIG problem. Before you apply any product – fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, fungicide – read the label! It should clearly state that it is safe to use on vegetables. If you are in doubt at all, go buy a product that is specifically for vegetable gardens.
I can’t emphasize enough….READ THE LABEL BEFORE USING ANYTHING!!!
Fertilizers are usually not a problem, as long as they are not combined with another product. The biggest mistake people make is using a “Weed & Feed” product they bought for their lawn. Yes, you might want to prevent weeds in your vegetable garden, but the particular herbicides in those Weed & Feed products are designed to kill plants like your vegetables. Some of those herbicides will persist in the soil and cause problems for your vegetables for 6-12 months!
Insecticides and fungicides are another issue. Herbicides prevent plants from growing, so you are unlikely to even get a crop. With insecticides and fungicides, a product that is not specifically labeled for use on vegetables may not be safe to use. Those residues may be in or on the plant, causing unknown harm. While unlikely that you would immediately get sick from eating a tomato with a chemical residue not intended for consumption, it is not a good idea to take a risk on pesticides that have not been labeled for use on a food crop or that are at a higher concentration than is labeled for safe use on food crops. You want to consider both short-term and long-term health in those cases, especially if you have young children or elderly in your family.
I personally would avoid consuming produce from a garden that has been treated with a product that is not labeled for edibles. I don’t think it is worth the risk.
Another Look at the Grafted and Non-Grafted Heirloom Tomatoes
On getting back to work this week, some of the differences between the grafted and non-grafted heirlooms have become increasingly apparent.
This is the view of the non-grafted part of the bed. The two plants on the end aren’t bad, but the next 4 grafted plants in line have withered to almost nothing. In fact, we did yank them out after I took this picture. They obviously weren’t going to produce anything, so it was time to go!
Looking the other direction, the grafted heirlooms are just a bit too healthy. (The brown, crispy plant on the right side is one of the non-grafted plants.) Of course, the healthy plants don’t seem to have many tomatoes either that I could see. But they at least have the potential to produce tomatoes! That’s a step in the right direction.
I rather suspect that there are some tomatoes on the grafted plants, but it’s hard to see them in that jungle. (I just justified that suspicion by going out and finding a ripe Marmande hidden in the jumble of leaves.)
First Raspberries
Our poor, sickly raspberry plants are suffering through the heat and are beginning to produce a few berries. Even in good health the weather is still just a little bit too hot for really good berries and with the root rot issues it is definitely too hot. The berries are going from under-ripe to over-ripe in the course of several hours. As I got looking at the plants, I discovered that not all of the canes are in terrible shape from the Phytophthora Root Rot. We’ve lost about a dozen canes from the center of the plant, and there are more that aren’t looking too good. But…there are some canes toward the back of the patch that are still pretty healthy!
If you look close, you can see that the berries on the left are about half the size of those on the right. That’s a great example of 2 things. First, the importance of healthy plants. Second, the importance of adequate water getting to the fruit during ripening. That’s the true damage of the disease right now, is that water can’t get all the way to the top of the canes, so the leaves are scorching and the fruit is small.
Rotting Raspberries
Our ‘Caroline’ Fall-bearing Raspberries have been looking sickly recently, which prompted me to do some investigating into the cause.
The plants were getting rather faded looking, the tops of the plants were showing lots of water stress – more than I expected to see even with the weather changing from very wet to hot and dry, and some of the canes were falling over and dying.
These symptoms told me that something was going on, either with the roots or the canes. I inspected the canes, and this is what I found:
You can see some brown lesions on the canes as well as a brown area near the base of the plant. I was expecting to see lesions on the canes, but I was hoping to see anthracnose lesions, since that is fairly treatable. This didn’t look like anthracnose. I consulted with our Plant Pathology folks and then sent in a sample of a cane and part of some roots.
The diagnosis? Phytophthora crown/root rot. Phytophthora is a particularly nasty organism…technically not a fungus (an oomycete), but just to make our lives easier, let’s consider it enough like a fungus to call it a fungus. Phythophthora loves wet soils and standing water. (Gee…do you see where this story is going?) Late blight of the Irish Potato Famine fame is also a type of Phytophthora.
These raspberries are planted on a raised bed (although not a very good one) in clay soil that hasn’t been much amended with compost. They’ve been awesome for the last couple years, but this seems likely to be the death knell. The only fungicide available cannot be applied within 45 days of harvest, and sadly these plants are just starting to flower. We would have to try to keep the plants from fruiting, which is likely to be a challenge and also to make sure that no one came along and ate one. Not likely in this demonstration garden!
So the moral of this story is to plant your raspberries in a well-drained location and don’t let it rain incessantly for a month. We will let the plants keep going and see if dry weather will let the plants recover and put up strong canes again next spring. I’m largely skeptical, but it’s possible!
