Remember those orange spider-looking galls on your junipers early this spring? Now there are brown to orange spots on your apple leaves and fruit. This is cedar-apple rust. The spring galls released spores into the air affecting apple trees. Later…
Powder mildew is showing up in gardens and flower beds earlier this year. It used to not have been a major problem years ago. As our summers get more humid, this fungus is now common. It starts out as a…
Blossom end rot in tomatoes shows up a browning or blackening areas on the bottom of the fruit. It is more common than not on the first ripening tomatoes. Pepper and eggplant also get this condition, but to a lesser…
This week I am hearing about leaf miner injury in various plants. You look at the leaf and see tunnels winding around between the tissues of the leaf. I have not seen heavy infestations that skeletonize the plant, however, they…
People are having issues with tomato leaf curl. There are no easy answers without looking at the leaf itself and doing some detective work. If the leaves are distorted with brown spots and the leaves are turning yellow. Answer: foliar…
Tomatoes leaf spots will be starting on the lower leaves and working their way up the plant. The main cause of this is fungi causing Septoria, early blight, and late blight. These are worse in wet, humid weather. The best…
I am noticing tents of caterpillars in fruit trees and other trees now. The adult moth lays eggs in a crotch of trees and the little caterpillars start spinning a web around the congregation. As they grow the tent becomes…
A square stem weed is popping up (seemly overnight) in gardens and flowerbeds and shady areas around the yard. It is called bedstraw or catchweed. When you touch the weed, it feels sticky. This is because of the little Velcro-like…
Spring is tough for gardeners in South Dakota. We get the twitch when temperatures get to the upper 70’s and think it could not possibly freeze now. But how wrong we are forgetting the last frost date is usually May…
People are seeing rodent damage on trees, especially young fruit trees. The worst-case scenario is if the rodent (whether mouse or rabbit) ate into the heart of the center wood circling the entire trunk, there is not much hope for…
I have noticed that there is a lot of sunscald on trees this year. Sunscald on trees usually happens on the south or south-west exposed bark where the sun’s warmth is stronger. The bark will die causing it to shed…
As long as there have been farmers and gardeners, there have been birds trying to eat their crops. And throughout the ages, farmers have tried to come up with ingenious ways to scare them off. Nowadays, scarecrows are familiar sights,…
It’s such a sinking feeling to have one’s garden pummeled by hail especially for farmers who lost crops. Anyways in a few days to a week you’ll probably get a good idea what is salvageable or not. It never looks…
We’re having a lot of trouble with diseases in tomatoes. Leaves turn brown from the bottom of the plant and move upward. Is it a blight or a wilt? We’ve moved the plants and rotated them to a new location…
Cedar apple rust is a fungal disease that requires juniper plants to complete its complicated two-year lifecycle. Spores overwinter as a reddish-brown gall on young twigs of various juniper species. In early spring, during wet weather, these galls swell, and…