Fall is a good time to foil garden fungus

I wish I were a painter. I think the immediate effects of that creative energy would be very rewarding. Sometimes that's what I pretend I'm doing when I garden, but in extreme slow motion, especially in spring when the entire vegetable patch is a blank palate. I delude myself that with patience, my subliminal artwork will mature into a beautiful, bountiful 3D canvas of produce first reaching for the sun and then gracing our kitchen.

I've had nearly three decades of planting, watering, weeding, and then using, freezing, and giving away harvests. High yields of squashes, cukes, and tomatoes made for an end of season frenzy. But sometimes Mother Nature just chuckles, because that wasn't even close to how this year's endeavors unfolded.

What the heck was going on? I was doing all the same things I'd done before. Here's the unraveling of it. We moved the vegetable garden from under the shade of growing trees to a different corner of the yard. My husband hand-built raised garden beds and we installed drip irrigation. Without enough research, we filled each bed with what I'd been told was the correct type of soil.

But what manifested from my gardening brush strokes was far from a glorious portrait.

In short order, every squash plant dissolved into white sickly leaves, hopeful flowering cucumber vines began to die from the ground outward; each bloom becoming a dried up nub, and every energetic heirloom tomato plant suddenly wore shriveled leaves, became skeletal, and sputtered out a token amount of fruit.

During coronavirus, this vegetable garden was supposed to give me hope and happiness, but it was just sad.

Weeks later than I should have, I headed to The Flower Bin in Longmont and was schooled by one of the best local gardening experts, Michael Morris. Morris and his partnering hard goods manager Luis Mendez staff the department where fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides, and all manners of mysterious gardener's trickery are shelved.

Gardening in Colorado has been Morris's passion for nearly 60 years and he's worked at the Flower Bin for the past 21 years. The genesis of his expertise comes from when, as a youngster, he worked daily with his grandmother in her Victory Garden - a patriotic concept that stretched from WWI through WWII. These personally tended plots were intended to sustain each household when rationed food wasn't enough and they were also billed as "civil morale boosters".

Morris said, "She taught me many lessons in that garden, including how to plant and grow. I still use many of those gardening techniques today."

Here's Morris's advice to avoid and treat the tragedies that led to swaths of my garden succumbing. Plants get sick quickly, so get out there every day to look for signs such as leaves that look like they're sprinkled with flour, have brown spots or chewed bits. Then don't delay, pick a sample of the offending leaves and get the problems diagnosed pronto.

Unfortunately, because of COVID-19, master gardeners aren't a resource this year. But, The Flower Bin and other gardening centers have diagnostic centers. Morris put my tomato and squash leaves under a digital microscope, which projected a super-sized and kind of gross image on a computer screen. Along with signs of fungus, bugs imperceptible to the naked eye, were swimming around in the veins of my vegetables.

Insects, like mites, are opportunists. When a plant is suffering, every one of the little guys knows it and makes a beeline to be well hosted. That explains why initially promising flowers don't come to fruition - plants are just too stressed to put their energy there.

My new motto is, "If you see something, spray something." Among other fungicides and insecticides, Neem oil is an excellent treatment. It's biodegradable and harmless to people, pets, and the environment.

Other important tips: don't use overhead watering in vegetable beds, irrigate close to the ground. Give plants plenty of space to allow for air circulation and be careful not to drown or overfeed plants.

"It's important to use an organic fertilizer that's suited to the crops you're growing," Morris said. "Organic fertilizers are going to give you more support for your soil."

Use a household disinfectant to clean your gardening tools so funguses aren't inadvertently transferred to perennials, trees...you name it.

Toss funky plants in the trash rather than letting them winter over on your soil or infect your compost bin.

Morris told me straight out, "You have dirt problems." I can't say this loudly enough, because I've learned the hard way – disease prevention begins with healthy soil, both structurally and nutritionally, because good dirt produces resilient plants. Amended native soil, meaning our area's clayish dirt, is the best way to go rather than complete replacement, according to Morris.

Come late September or early October, enhance soil with either a cover crop, which later gets tilled in or used for mulch, or work in two to three inches of organic material like sheep, peat and clean compost.

Next year, plant each vegetable in a new location and, if that's not an option, replace some of the soil before planting.

Select vegetable varieties that have been cultivated to stave off diseases – its tags will tout that. Heirloom plants are not disease resistant, but you can protect them and other plants by using a preventative side dressing of sulfur dust, which tells fungus spores to scram. I was not about to leave the garden center without a container of that sweet stuff.

I'm just throwing this out there to the universe...next year I'm hopeful that in addition to saying goodbye to Coronavirus, garden fungus worries will be a thing of the past.