CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (Chambana Today) — When I’m planning my garden in late winter (March-ish), my mind is primarily focused on whatever is going on in March, life-wise. The garden issues I ran into the year before are a hazy memory which leads me to make the same choices — which results in me having the same problems year after year. It can feel like I’m not good at gardening. Maybe this is you too? I’ve learned that when I blame myself and jump to assuming something is my fault, it prevents me from seeing the problem clearly. The truth is, there are many issues that us gardeners run into that are not our fault, and sometimes we can avoid those issues completely by making different choices in the spring. I’ve found that if I take notes and photos of my garden before frost, it can help refresh my memory in March as I begin to make the choices I have to stick with for the rest of the season. Maybe you’re prone to blaming yourself too. Or maybe you’re going through something in your life right now that makes gardening the last thing you can care about, and ‘just can’t’ add a whole extra garden journaling project to your stack of to-do’s. For me it can be confusingly hard to keep up with regular life even if there’s nothing on the calendar. Finding the motivation to do something can be hard, but what’s worse is living with the regret of not doing it. The [metaphorical] voice in my head that says ‘You’re just not trying hard enough’ is quite loud and very chatty and it just goes on and on and on about how I’m not trying hard enough and it’s just… it’s just… so… so… boring. I realized that recently. It wasn’t a life-changing perspective shift, but it is a new tool that I’m playing around with. Sometimes I have it in me to tell that voice to shut up for a second so I can try to think about how to tackle something a different way. Those moments have given me enough clarity to realize that ‘the problem is you, just try harder’ is not a plan, and thinking it is won’t get me any closer to solving problems. Those are very broad statements that apply to more than just gardening, but that mindset is what led me to piece together a fall gardening notes/photos ‘process’ that I know I can actually get done. Reading this article will take you far longer than the actual work of going out into the garden, taking a few photos, and jotting a few things down. If you’re trying to imagine a workflow, here’s the basic process:
- I grab my phone, walk around the garden/lawn and take a few photos of my plants that are diseased, or plants that I need to move, etc.
- I’ll make a photo album on my phone called “Garden 2025” and I’ll add all the photos I just took.
- Then I’ll make a calendar event for myself for some weekend next March and name it “Garden Planning Notes.” I’ll write garden notes in the event description, and I’ll mention that I put the photos in the “Garden 2025” album because I will forget by March.
Basically, I have to imagine future me doesn’t remember much about the previous season, so the notes aren’t about everything; just the important things I definitely need future-me to remember. What about you? Are there any plants that you liked this season that seem to have acquired diseases or growing issues? Maybe a cherished tomato variety that checked out halfway through the season, or a basil whose leaves all slowly died, or the phlox had the ugliest-looking leaves at the end of the season. You can use the photos and notes you took to research your garden problems later. I live in Champaign, a few blocks from Prospect and University, and in upcoming columns I’ll use my own photos from my own “Garden 2025” album to describe a few issues and diseases that I’ve run into over the past handful of years. I’ll try to go over how I figured out what the problems were, so that way maybe you can pick up a few ideas for how to research things for yourself. I hope this column helps you see the value of notes/diagnostic photos from this time of year. I also hope this will help you see your gardening issues more objectively to avoid the trap of blaming yourself.
Some things are just not going to look great this time of year regardless
We’re at the beginning of fall, and a lot of plants by the end of the season are just not going to look their best. Some plants have already completed their life cycle for the season, and are naturally yellowing and winding down on their own. Other plants just inevitably start showing symptoms for a little bit of disease by the end of the summer. It’s important to remember as you walk through your garden this fall that diseases are not completely avoidable. When you look at plants in late summer, you have to evaluate them with some level of acceptance that diseases are just a part of gardening. So how do you know which plants have problems that can be solved? Well first, you need to figure out what you want to focus on, and to do that you need to think about your needs. I mean your needs very loosely, that means different things to different people. As an example: most tomatoes get some sort of ‘something’ by the end of the year, but some tomato plants are still able to outpace the spread of the disease. Basically they grow through the problem and continue producing just fine until frost. Other diseased tomatoes are clearly affected because by the time September rolls around, they are far less productive or maybe even dead. Assuming the goal of growing the tomatoes was to have them produce tomatoes, I would think that for most people, the ones that are not producing tomatoes are not meeting your needs. Just remember that with gardening (as with life), the number of problems you notice will always outpace the amount of time you have available to solve them. I get overwhelmed by this sometimes. But the only way I can exit the ‘mental spiral of overwhelm’ is to remind myself that the ‘assignment’ is not to fix all the things. Easier said than done. When I can, I try to release myself from the pressure of needing to fix all the things and instead spend the time working to understand my own needs and letting that guide my focus. If this comes to you naturally, I have two things to say to you: first, congratulations (genuine compliment) and second, congratulations (envious sarcasm).
You can avoid diseases by choosing different plants
Knowing what diseases you have in your garden will help you avoid worse problems in the future. For most common garden plants (flower, herb, vegetable or native) there is usually a path forward — in the sense that there are often equivalent alternatives or varieties available which have some level of resistance or tolerance. Unfortunately there isn’t a variety of any plant that is magically resistant to all the things. If you know (or in some cases make an educated guess) what diseases you have, then you can pick the varieties that are resistant to the diseases common to your garden/block/neighborhood and give them a better chance at thriving. Then you can do research “later” like in March to try to figure out what diseases you had this year. There are a few exceptional diseases that don’t have an easy solution. One those is “Aster Yellows,” which I found in my garden this year. It’s a stressful one to deal with because most plants have little or no resistance. I’ve spotted it here and there around town, but most yards and gardens don’t have it, so I wouldn’t describe it as a ‘common’ disease. For the more common ‘usual suspects’ plant diseases of the vegetable and herb garden (downy mildew, powdery mildew, anthracnose, various viruses etc.), I’d say that there are usually at minimum one or two varieties of each type of that are resistant to any given plant disease. The same is usually true for flowers and ornamentals. One rather interesting exception that I did a deep dive on recently is bacterial wilt in melons (Cucumis melo aka cantaloupe, muskmelons, honeydew, etc.). A couple beetles that are very common in the Midwest can and do spread a type of “bacterial wilt” disease which affects melons and cucumbers the worst (cukes and melons are very closely related). The wilt can affect most of their other relatives (squashes, gourds, etc.) to some degree (except watermelons, which rarely get it). If a cucumber gets bitten by an infected beetle, the wilt will take it out by early summer; the melons are soon to follow. There are a small number of cucumber varieties that are resistant or tolerant of Bacterial Wilt. As far as I can tell there aren’t any melon varieties available to purchase that are resistant to bacterial wilt. If I‘m wrong, let me know! Melons aren’t impossible to grow; you can grow them around here. They do take more care than other types of produce, and you really have to stay vigilant and watch out for those beetles.
Why You Should Care About Plant Diseases
You might be wondering, ‘why can’t plants just fend for themselves? Why not just let nature take its course and let the plants figure it out?’ Well, if left alone, urban or suburban areas have had so much disturbance and unwanted species introduced from other places that if left alone, there isn’t a natural balance anymore for things to return to. We created these cities and towns, so it’s up to us to take care of the nature that lives with us. Plants, like humans, are not sterile (everyone reading this has mites living on their face, except for the AI bots, those probably just get viruses). Plants can’t eat yogurt; they don’t have stomachs or intestines with bacteria, but they do have a ‘micro biome’ and there are lots of bacteria and fungi and even viruses living around, inside, and on top of plants. Some of them are benign, some of them are extremely beneficial, and some — under the right conditions — can infect plants and cause disease. Sometimes they live in the soil and enter the plant through the roots when the plant is under stress, sometimes they are spread from plant to plant through insects like certain species of leafhoppers and beetles, and sometimes they are spread through spores in the air (like some leaf spot diseases and rust fungi).
How to take photos of your diseased or sad-looking plants
Take a handful of photos of diseased plants in your garden and save them in a photo album on your phone. Get closeups of the leaves that have symptoms, top and bottom, and then one or two wide shots of the whole plant. If you’re dealing with wilted tomatoes, peppers, or in my case tomatillos that are dying anyways, pull it up and slice open the first 4-6 inches of the base of the stem, and then take a photo. By the time March rolls around there’s really no telling if I’ll remember which photo goes with what plant. For me, I find it helpful to just assume that I’m going to forget about the details and then make accommodations just in case. I’m always trying to leave future-me as many clues as possible. What I do is take all the photographs of one plant; then before moving onto the next, I’ll swipe through the pictures and make sure they’re in focus, and I’ll make sure there is a readable label in at least one photo (sometimes I just hold the label). Then when I’ve finished with one plant, I’ll take a picture of the sky. Does that make sense? Next year when I look at the album, I don’t have to remember which shot goes with which plant because the pictures of the sky act as dividers between plants. Let’s say you have a few types of tomatoes that didn’t do great this year, but you really liked the flavors. What I would do is take three to four photos of the first type of tomato (including a photo with the label visible), then a photo of the sky, and then I’ll move to the second tomato; get those pictures, and then another photo of the sky. Finally, I’ll put all those photos in an album named “Garden 2025.” If my weird approach doesn’t speak to you, then you’ll have to find your own thing. Picture yourself a few months from now trying to remember what photo goes with what plant. Imagine getting annoyed and saying “I wish I had done _____” — do whatever comes to mind now so you avoid having to tell yourself that in the future. And then of course after you have the photos, set up that calendar alert for sometime next year, make a few notes about what you want to tell yourself next spring, note where the photos are, and then move on with your day.
Diagnose Later
You’re probably wondering how you use these photos to diagnose plants. Of course, master gardeners are probably going to laugh at my suggestion of putting off identifying a disease until winter; they know it’s best to identify diseases when you have the actual living (or freshly dead) plant specimen available to inspect. And they’re right. That’s the correct way of doing things. In real life, a lot of us get overwhelmed or don’t have the time, so diagnosing from reference photos is better than nothing.
