Death and Destruction

Last week's Master Gardener topic was plant pathology, the scientific study of the nature of plant disease and its causes, processes, development, and consequences.  Well it was just horrible because apparently I have done everything wrong in my yard, each plant is doomed, and death is imminent.

My murderous offenses:

1. Pruning my pear trees. Well they were scraping the top of my truck when I drove out of the driveway!! What was I supposed to do! According to MG, they will now begin to rot from the cuts I made.  This necrosis will travel inward to the trunk and they will die a grisly death; they've got two years at the most.  (If rot doesn't get them, fire blight will.  Say good bye to your pears too!)

2. Mixing my chemicals too strong.  Well, you know, if lime juice and cilantro are your favorite ingredients in salsa, what do you do? Add more! Right?! And if Oil of Olay prevents wrinkles, then twice as much will prevent twice as many wrinkles! I mean who doesn't live by this maxim?  Well apparently toxic substances don't.  Doubling up on the amount of fungicide, herbicide, and insecticide will kill your plants as well as the fungus, weeds, and bugs!

3. Not rotating my crops often enough.  But seriously, everybody knows that corn and okra need to be grown in the back garden plots because they are tall, while squash and zucchini get the front plots.  This creates a pleasing aesthetic and carries your eye through the garden creating depth and dimension. It also apparently fosters root knot nematodes and Southern Blight in your soil.   Who knew that in gardening, practicality trumps beauty?

4. Not getting a head start.  I thought you sprayed for plant disease when the plant got diseased, but no!  You have to spray before the plant shows signs of disease.  Apparently, you should start spraying your roses for black spot on Christmas morning.

5. Having a limited vocabulary of symptoms.  Apparently it isn't good enough to recognize that your plant is "sick".  You must know if it has blotch, blight, scorch, canker, wilt, scab, dieback, rot, stunt, gall, leaf curl, or blister.

Well, I'd like to think things were going to get better, but this week our topic is weeds. I'm sure we've been invaded by hordes of weeds the spread of which will rival the Roman Empire. 

                                                                                       Until then, Shelli

P.S. - Well, apparently I used the words "well" and "apparently" a lot in this post. Well, I really don't care because apparently I have more important problems at hand.

**Fun fact:  That weird orange spaghetti looking stuff you sometimes see growing on the side of the road is a parasitic plant called "dodder".  It starts off growing in the soil, with roots and everything, but as soon as it can reach up and curl around its host plant, the roots shrivel up and the plant lives solely off nutrients it sucks out of the host. Who knew??