HELP - leaf/plant disease!

[Bob Petruska]

This is the second year that it looks like my vegetable and flower garden are doomed. I thought it was only the luck of last year when I had crop failure and not to happen this year but I was wrong.

The problem if that my transplants which look very good were planted 4 weeks ago in Pennsylvania. My soil was tested and came back with very acceptable results for all ranges.

The top leaf photo is of my parsely in a container, there is purple fringing of the leaves and the parsely is growing extremely slow.

The nice dark geen plant leaves, especially my Marigolds, are now turning a very pale green and with what looks like a splotchy appearance see the bottom leaf in the attached photo link. They look sick now and not that nice healthy green leaf. The top leaves look better but not the nice dark geen leaf as when they were first transplanted. I have used 10-10-10 fertilizer when I tilled my garden 4 weeks ago and I also included Ironrite to make sure that there was enough iron in the soil.

my vegetables and flowers seem to grown very slow and stay small. The same Lady Luck marigolds would always grow 20-24 inches tall and just as wide for 20 years. Last year they only grew 10 inches tall and 6 inches wide. This year looks like the same is going to happen. My tomato plants grow small and not bushy at all. I tilled in about 10% mushroom soil this year hoping for a boost. The parsley is in a container with just fresh potting soil (no mushroom soil), a little 10-10-10, ironite and a little limestone.

I'm stumped!

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Bob P.

[Amos Nomore]

Dang. Looks like fertilizer burn. I suspect your soil is overloaded with soluble salts which are osmotically restricting water uptake in your plants and possibly directly damaging roots. If the soil drains well, heavy watering will flush out some of these salts and your plants may improve. If the soil is heavy and drains poorly, heavy watering may make the plants even sicker. It's easy to run into trouble amending soil with chemical fertilizers. I would avoid them and use organics next year. Good luck!

[Sheldon]

The weather in the northeast has been too cool (especially nights) and too wet... is now just beginning to improve. Have patience, there isn't much you can do, not about the weather.

[Kay Lancaster]

On Sun, 24 Jun 2007 15:21:52 -0400, Bob Petruska

Offhand, looks to me like the parsley might have salt damage and the marigolds spider mite damage, but that's just a wild guess based on common things that look like this. There are a lot of "clues" that just don't show up in a photo.

You need to get some of the affected plants to someone who can really examine them... plant disease clinic, extension service, master gardeners, good nursery(wo)man.

What's the weather been like the last two years? How much water and fertilizer do you apply a week? How many hours of sun a day on these crops?

Your very best bet for good answers is probably here:

special attention to filling out the forms as well as you can and selecting good samples.

Kay

[Bob Petruska]

The parsley is in a container so I can flush the soil very easily. This may be a very good test as if the flush restores the parsley then the salt over load would look like the cause. I only fertilized very lightly about 4 weeks ago. Rain here in northeast PA has been low, about once a week and very light. I only water once a week when plants start to droop.

Do you feel that it would be ok to transplant the parsely into new soil in the container and still be within the growing season or will the transplanting just stunt the regrow try?

[Bob Petruska]

Kay,

The weather here in northeastern PA where I live has been what I call pretty good. I has rained about nce a week approximately 0.5 inches per week. I water when plants start to droop. The plants receive about 8 hours of direct sun. I only fertilized very lightly 4 weeks ago when I first planted. I'm going to see if I can take a few plants to a Penn State University extension for analysis but I tried than years ago with a tree disease issue and didn't get too far.

[Amos Nomore]

I would try flushing the parsley pot with two or three times the volume of the pot with plain water, and see if that helps.

[Kay Lancaster]

Spider mites do best on stressed plants in low humidity. Most crops need about 1" of water a week, so you may also be underwatering, as "watering when the plants start to droop" is likely a bit late, and usually too little (it takes a long time to get half an inch of water on a plant, by standing there with the hose -- also longer than most people think with a sprinkler.)

Tree problems can be harder to diagnose than annual problems, just because trees take so long to die, and conditions they experienced 5-10 years ago can play into their current condition. Annuals and plants grown as annuals are much easier.

Kay

[Bob Petruska]

Kay,

I'm sending in my samples to the Penn State "CSI". I sure wish that I knew the head of that service personally so he could visit my veggie patch and make recommendations. By the way I did go to Penn State for 7 years and donate a lot to it so maybe they can help me.

Thanks,

Bob P.

[Kay Lancaster]

When I was in grad school, we used to get samples coming into extension service that no one had an idea of what it was... we called it "stump the botanist"

They included such things as cuttings in plastic bags sent over a long, warm weekend (just pour 'em out and then try to read the paperwork that was also sogged out so you could call and ask for another sample), or questions about a leaf disease, and the sample would be a leafless twig, or just plain strange stuff, like the objects we finally realized were what was left of a sycamore ball once the fuzzies blew off, or the strange little structures that took me several minutes to realize were the little separating structures from a velvetleaf fruit (that one was a CSI special, btw, because it came from a murder scene, complete with a detective who brought it along so we weren't breaking chain of evidence).

One of my favorites was the "weed" someone wanted to know how to get rid of -- turned out to be a threatened wildflower. Luckily, he was delighted, and Nature Conservancy helped him manage the area with the plants.

But my very favorite was the "mold" growing on someone's bathroom wall. The mycologists didn't know what it was, but it wasn't a mold... maybe it was insect eggs? The entomologists said it wasn't insect eggs, maybe it was bacterial? Bacteriologists said it was cellular, so it wasn't theirs. Finally wound up with me in the seed lab, and I thought it looked like really small nettle seeds, but I didn't have an exact match. What it turned out to be were seeds shot from an artillery plant, in the nettle family. The folks who sent the sample had one on their windowsill.

Life in extension service can be interesting. ;-)

Kay