5 Simple Tricks for Preventing Pests & Disease
1) Mulch. We’ve said it before; we’ll say it again: mulch everything you can. Whether you opt for black plastic, paper mulch, fabric, straw, leaves or newspaper, mulching well can prevent a lot of problems in the garden. To expound on its benefits, mulch
- Decreases mobility for pests that transmit diseases like powdery mildew and bacterial wilt
- Saves water by reducing evaporation from the soil, which in turn may help prevent problems related to water uptake, like blossom end rot
- Smothers weeds that reduce air circulation, exacerbate fungal diseases, and can be hosts for pathogens
- Straw mulch adds organic matter to the soil, lightening heavy soils and improving friability of sandy ones, ultimately improving soil health, biodiversity and resilience
- Regulates soil temperature, black plastic warming the soil in the spring for heat-loving crops, while straw cools it, reducing heat stress that makes plants vulnerable to infection
With that in mind, did you have any specific tips or advice on potato pests? I've attempted to grow some twice now, in a small area of my backyard I've now dubbed The Potato Graveyard as they've either rotted out before I've gotten to them, or they've been really small and not great quality. With some searching I thought it might be one of these but I'm not sure. Any ideas or links to useful info would be great!
Overall, here in Central Florida, it was a great "dry spring" year for Tomatoes, and we got a nice harvest prior to the onset of "rainy season), but once the daily rains and intense summer HEAT kicked in, disease and pests started to take a toll.
So far, I've lost two of my best producing tomato plants to "Southern Blight" (Sclerotium rolfsii), which may be what's getting your plants as well.
Formerly extremely hale and abundantly producing tomato plants suddenly looked "wilty," even after heavy rains. I went over to the wilted plants, pulled away the pine straw mulch, and saw the typical white fungal growth creeping up the base of the stem from the soil line. Two days later, after additional heavy rains that kept me from further garden maintenance, my worst fears were confirmed by the subsequent presence of the tiny yellow spherical "mustard seed looking" sclerotia on the ground next to the infected stems.
An internet search of "southern blight" or "southern stem wilt" will yield a lot of pictures you can compare to your plants, and more information regarding how next to proceed.
When I see wilt, I reach for my torch, and prepare to accept the loss of a once beloved food-bearing plant. I burn all the obvious fungal growth, sclerotia, infected stem, a bit of the surrounding mulch, surface soil, etc. I carefully pull out the plant and bag it, and likewise bag as much of the roots and about a square foot of the surrounding soil for disposal at the landfill. I prepare a "medicinal" bucket of compost that includes used coffee grounds that have been stored in a loose plastic bag (to hopefully encourage growth of beneficial microbes on the surface of the "UCGs"), along with a few scoops of corn meal, to likewise encourage beneficial, and pathogen-consuming or competing microbes that hopefully will make the soil environment less hospitable to Sclerotina rolfsii.
My extension agent told me that the southern blight pathogen has an EXTREMELY wide host range, and that I might as well cross off the area for future planting of just about anything. "Just let the Bahia grass grow over it."
My husband, more optimistically counsels, "I bet it's one of those diseases that's most active in the hot weather....it's probably EVERYWHERE, those particular plants probably just got wounded at a bad time, in a bad place, and couldn't fight the infection."
I know that the southern blight pathogen seems to take advantage of "partially or incompletely composted vegetable matter," so I'll be more careful about my "chop and drop" practices, and try not to get anything "recently living" too close to the base of any of our summer crops. I can't do anything about the wounds to plants or the diseases vectored by the legions of summer pests we suffer here (between the stink bugs, thrips, leaf hoppers, raccoons, etc., it's a miracle we get ANY produce out of our garden in the summer time :)
I also bought some Actinovate, and intend to do a soil drench around any transplants henceforward, as we've had "victims" of Southern Wilt appear in spotty, non-linear areas around the garden, so I suspect the pathogen is fairly widespread in our landscape (and town...as I see other gardens in the neighborhood with suspiciously "wilted even after rain" landscape plants).
You're not alone! We all suffer "the Wilt," and work to re-balance the soil fauna, and provide our food plants with sufficient nutrition, and better living conditions to battle these terrible opportunistic pathogens in the future.
Best wishes...you will grow successfully again...but perhaps - in that particular blight-affected area after inoculating the soil with beneficial microbes, and rotating into some tolerant cover crops, and later cool-season crops, when the disease seems not as active. (I planted corn this spring in an area affected last spring that was subsequently re-enriched, put into cover crop in late summer - fall, then rotated into brassica and allium for late fall - winter - early spring. The corn did well, and seemed unaffected by the pathogen. I'll probably try a similar strategy to deal with this most recent infection.)
Best wishes.
Fellow wilt-suffering gardener,
Hope.
I haven't mulched around them either.