Click below to listen to my 2 min. Garden Bite radio show: Diagnosing plant problems
Why do my leaves lay over? How come they’re yellow? What are those holes in the leaves? My plant just doesn’t look healthy, what’s wrong? UGH, I think the toughest part of gardening is trying to figure out why a plant isn’t thriving! Sometimes it’s easy, like the photo below:
Sometimes, it’s not easy at all and could be a number of ailments at one time. Is it an insect, is it a disease, are my plants getting the nutrients they need. Enough water, too much water? Maybe this particular plant doesn’t like afternoon sun or one day you’re looking down on something that makes you go “eeewww, what’s that?”
I know enough to know that I will be forever learning. Especially when it comes to diagnostics. There are a number of good books and the University of Minnesota Extension has some diagnostics tools.
Seeing the foamy stuff surrounding spittlebugs makes this easy. And they are squishable!
And Aphids, because they’re on nearly everything and you can just give them a good blast of water to kill ‘em. I just ran my fingers along the stems of my monarda. Sounds gross but it’s effective!
Lady beetles love to eat aphids! NOT Asian beetles! Here is some great information from Plunkett’s pest control on these two bugs. Asian beetles are an invasive pest.
The rose sawfly already went after my Easy Elegance ‘Kashmir’ rose. It’s the little larva that eat the leaves.
Before using any chemical, know what you’re dealing with. One time only 1 branch of a lilac bush was dying. ODD, I looked up possibilities. Then I crawled under the lilac and saw that “someone” had weed wacked the flexible plastic marker into the branch and over time, strangled it. Goes to show, ya just never know!
There are apps out there on diagnosing plant problems but I wouldn’t use them alone, it’s very easy to misdiagnose something and use the wrong method to handle the issue. Verify with another source.
