Gardening News and Tips

Healthy, Delicious Organic Vegetables: Grow Your Own!

Which lawn and tree service company should you choose?

Why You Should Cleanse Your Hands

How To Deal With Landscaping Problems

The Best Vegetable Gardening Tips

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Keeping your vegetables disease free is an ongoing effort. But that chore is made easier when you employ a broad-based effort that doesn’t rely solely on one method.

Selecting proper seed and preparing the soil are a good beginning. Select healthy plants if you are planning to transplant. This keeps disease from being introduced and multiplying. Uproot diseased plants to prevent further infection.

Watering early in the day is usually the most appropriate time. Leaves then have time to dry before overnight temperatures settle in. The spread of disease can be influenced by your watering practices. If water splashes off one diseased plant onto another plant, then the disease plant may infect the healthy plant. Rainfall can produce the similar situation. Be sure to space your plants out.

Also, viruses can be spread by insects who carry them from one plant to the next. Controlling the insect population benefits you exponentially. There are also ways that gardeners and animals can spread disease. Gardeners gloves and the legs of rabbits can carry tobacco mosaic virus, for example.

Keeping the garden well weeded will lower the prospect of disease. Keeping the area attractive turns out to have health benefits, as well. Many organisms thrive on weeds, then move onto your vegetables. They can be carried by wind, insect, water movement and other means.

Controlling various disease can be helped if you are able to identify the signs of these diseases.

When the out edges of lettuce touch the ground, lettuce mold can appear as a wet rot. The Sclerotinia mold is white and Botrytis mold is gray. The problem can be contained by removing the mold by extracting infected sections, or an entire plant.

Leafy vegetables commonly encounter spinach mosaic virus as well. In this case, leaves become mottled, and may later turn yellow. The plant appears wilted and stunted. Choosing resistant varieties can eliminate this problem altogether.

Fusarium can cause asparagus to wilt or rot. The spears look spindly and shoots may become yellow. The roots may rot and become discolored. Eliminate the infected plants by thinning the crop. Another common problem with asparagus is rust, cause by Puccinia fungus. Red spots appear on the shoots of spears. This fungus may survive through the winter. Prevent rust by avoiding excessive watering.

Leaf spots, blight and other conditions affect tomatoes. They’ll usually appear by mid-August, especially if the summer has been cool. Some soil fungi affect tomatoes in particular. Nearby walnut trees can produce a toxin that is harmful, where the roots carry it into the soil. Look out for dark concentric rings on leaves. Keeping the leaves from being wet at night will help reduce these problems.

You will optimize your chances of a healthy, abundant crop if you can recognize and treat the signs of disease in the early stages.