Bugs, Beasts and Blight Part 3

Part three of a three part series

Western Kansas is spared a lot of the foliage blights and diseases so prevalent in other parts of the state.  Why? Because we are drier, windier and enjoy cooler nights than our neighbors to the east…..generally speaking.  The “general rule” has been out of commission for the past week, as we have enjoyed almost daily rain showers/deluges.  But trust me, those weather conditions will return and we will once again be complaining about having to drag hoses and lean into the wind.  We forget that sometimes our curses are blessings in disguise.

Probably the most familiar disease we bump into is the foliage diseases common to tomatoes.  Several different kinds of troubles can persist in tomato growing, but science has been working hard to get the bright red, vine ripened fruit/veggie to our table.  Not so much in the treatment of disease, but in the development of varieties that are resistant to the various diseases.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to knock down a raging epidemic of some fungus and blights.  Instead, work at prevention.  Buy plants that have the capability of staving off the disease and on the other side of the coin, give up growing those crops or ornamentals that promise to give you passle of problems with disease.  Our farmstead is surrounded by more than a hundred cedar trees that do a bang up job of giving us good wind protection, but they have made it impossible to put a single red apple in a cobbler.  Cedar apple rust, a disease that creates those ugly orange balls on the cedar trees lives part of it’s life cycle on apples, crabapples and hawthornes.  To stay ahead of that, we would have to implement a timely spray program that would keep us tied to a chemical bottle and the battle would be intense.  So we have chosen not to grow apples.  We’ve lost all our hawthornes and non-resistant crabs as well.

I sat through a whole day of classes in Master Gardener training on diseases only to hear the good professor from K-State tell us over and over to throw out or dig up any diseased plant.  I thought “I didn’t give up a day just to learn to give up growing something”, but that is more or less some very good and timely advice in the battle of plant disease. 

After almost 50 years of growing in western Kansas, I’ve learned to grow roses resistant to black spot, ignore powdery mildew in the lilacs and plant only VFNT tomatoes. If you are determined to do battle with disease, work at it from the prevention angle.  Begin a fungicide spray program early and often, before the disease symptoms are evident.  And be thankful we live in an area of the state that has few serious disease challenges.

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