Vegetable disease

Many gardeners are starting their fall garden and landscape clean-up - which is good and bad. Garden sanitation, if insects or diseases were a problem this year, is an important step to reduce problems next year. But we need to balance pest control with allowing habitat for beneficial insects and pollinators. So, how can that be done? 

It’s so disappointing to reach mid-summer, having nurtured a vegetable for several months, only to find disease problems starting to appear!

The first step toward control should always be disease identification. Gardeners can submit pictures of plant problems to Nebraska Extension experts through our Digital Diagnostic Network, http://digitaldiagnostics.unl.edu/.  An expert panel of Extension professionals will promptly review and respond to your question.

Blossom end rot (BER) is a common problem of tomatoes, but is also found on peppers, eggplant, squash and watermelon. It appears as flat, dry, sunken, brown tissue on the blossom end of the fruit, opposite the stem end. The rot is first seen as a small, water-soaked spot on the base of half-developed fruits and continues to enlarge as the fruit matures. The size of the rotted area varies, but can cover 30 to 50% of the fruit.

Looking through all the beautiful tomato pictures in a seed catalog, how do you choose the best cultivars for your garden? Every gardener knows nothing is more disappointing than to raise a tomato plant, finally have it loaded with fruit, when suddenly it wilts and dies. One way to prevent this disaster is to choose tomato cultivars carefully with disease resistance in mind.

Pest control - insects, diseases and weeds - are challenging for the home organic vegetable gardener. Today we’ll focus on techniques for insect and disease control. Organic gardens may have a higher level of insect and disease damage. Decide how much damage can be tolerated as a threshold for determining when control is needed.

Pest Prevention
Start the gardening season by using these six basic principles to minimize disease problems.