Skip to main content

FUNNNNGGGGUUUUSSSSSS!

Yes, that was a cheesy reference to Star Trek, which hubby and I went and saw last week to start our Memorial weekend off right.  It was great by the way.

Things in our garden have been not so great.  I was taking a closer look at our broccoli and found this:


At first I was thinking, maybe they aren't getting enough water.  But typically, if a plant is parched, it just gets wilty.  They aren't wilty.  Naturally, I call Grandpa.  He said they're sick - caught a virus.  Awesome.  I did some Googling, just to confirm what Grandpa was saying, maybe it was something else (hope of hopes).  Nope, Google Images confirmed it - our broccoli caught broccoli herp.  On top of the illness, I found some tiny aphids.  ::grrr::

Grandpa recommended Sevin Dust:


So I see this takes care of bugs, but I needed to clarify if it takes care of the virus.  Are the plants salvageable (he said yes)?  Did a bug cause the virus?  And holy crap, is this gonna spread to my newly acquired tomatoes and peppers??  And something that kills 65 bugs surely cannot be organic.

I guess I had the equivalent of a gardening nervous breakdown.  I decided I wanted more information (sorry Grandpa) and went to Tagawa with my picture in tow.  And guess what they said - it's not a virus, but a fungus.

Even awesomer.

It's caused from watering at the leaf level (read: sprinkler), versus at the soil level (read: drip).  Sure enough, the effected plants are all next to the one sprinkler we still had left.  I find this surprising being in Colorado where it is so dry.  I water first thing in the morning, around 6:30am, and I really thought that provided enough time for the water to burn off.  Guess not.

The nice people at Tagawa loaded us up with fungicide and an insecticidal soap.  It turns out, the homemade insecticidal soap I made was useless, because sulfur was removed from common soaps about 3 years ago.

So far, so good.  The insecticidal soap seems to be doing the job on the aphids.  The broccoli looks a little better too, but still not quite "healed."  They will get a weekly spraying of the medicine and hopefully they will rebound.

Post Medicine Broccoli:

  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Garden Noob's July Recap

Dear Time, Please stop moving.  Thanks, Me Hello August, or what I like to call the gateway month into Christmas.  The garden has been moving along.  I did a major cleaning this weekend of overgrowing leaves and vines, tomato suckers, and ripped out all our broccoli and cauliflower.  They had issues, let's just leave it at that. Sadly I didn't take a lot of pictures of the work I did because quite frankly, I was frantically trying to get it done before a very busy weekend.  I'm glad I did as this week has been nothing but rain, so all my freshly groomed plants can soak it all in. Our first tomatoes are starting to turn red, mostly the Romas and heirloom cherry tomatoes.  I find that I like these heirloom versions much better than the standard grocery store ones.  Go figure.  :-) Hubby also has a baby watermelon.  Watermelon are notoriously hard to grow out here, so we'll see how he does, but so far, so good. Zucchini is ...

Plant Problem #2: Peppers

My peppers are looking funkified.  I know it's a horrible picture, but I'm sure you can see those blackish spots. I'm not sure if they have picked up the previous plant herp, aka fungus, that the broccoli and cauliflower had.  Or maybe some other kind of blight?  I'm treating it with the fungicide and rolling with it.  I've come to accept the fact, long before we even started this whole gardening thing, that not every plant was going to be a winner.  If they don't make it, they don't make it.  C'est la vie.  For a dose of good news, we had our first zucchini harvest this week. I made lovely zucchini ribbons with a meat sauce for a couple lunches this week. In the background, you'll notice a zucchini accident (young one I broke while trying to trim off dead) and a pepper.  Apparently, you are supposed to remove the first peppers to encourage growth.  So I lopped him off and here's to hoping between that and the fungicide, the p...

Oh the Humanity or Things that Make Me Cry

Ok, I didn't cry, but I wanted to. We decided to start hardening our seedlings this weekend.  Basically this means putting them outside for periods of time to get them used to wind, climate, sun, whatever - the outside.  I put them on our deck's railing, since we were using our table to transplant the carrots and parsnip into pots. Side-note :  We do not expect the carrots and parsnip to make it.  Apparently, carrots and parsnips do not transplant well, but we started growing them before we knew that.  They are very spindly with fragile roots, so this doesn't surprise me one bit.  Live and learn.  But I still felt bad and wanted to give them a shot at life.  So they are in pots. Everyone was happy and healthy until about 5pm, when a storm tried to blow in.  And when I say blow, I mean blow.  Cuz this happened to my BEAUTIFUL lettuce, kale, and spinach seedlings - flop.  Dead. They were my strongest, healthiest looking seedli...