My own unscientific observations is that whenever my plants have had disease like you show, there have been watering issues. Either soil too wet, too dry, wet spots & dry spots together, leaves wet at night, soil goes gets too dry before watering. All this causes stress. You might want to use the finger method to continually observe the container wetness and notice the plants health at the same time. After doing this awhile you can usually tell just by looking at the plant the state of the soil wetness. Also, even if my plants were fertilizer deprived, but the soil wetness was good, they didn't develop disease (they just stayed yellow in color and didn't grow much). Also watering the leaves on a hot sunny day, helps prevent disease. Spore/fungus will start to grow but as the leaves dry in about 1/2 an hour, they die.

My EEs are lush, full and tall but this past week the margins between veins are becoming paler in a striped,marbled look. It's most pronounced on the smaller,youngest leaves. They're hard to get to since the bed is full and fronted by vitex and lots of other foliage plants. What treatment do you suggest? Feeding? Would a spray on liquid like Miracle Gro be of some help? At least I could hit the leaves with the spray. Might be able to chuck some Osmocote pellets back there if that's better. What do you think? They have three more months before any risk of frost and I'd like them to stay healthy looking.

Two things to update on the post that nobody seems interested in... 1. There is a relatively new product called "serenade" that is offered as a non-toxic alternative to damping off diseases and a litany of other fungal villains. Most fungicides, of course, are HIGHLY toxic, where as this one is simply a fungicidal bacteria, a strain of the bacteria Bacillus Subtilis", it smells terrible, but so far has worked relatively well for me since I began using it a week or so ago. I have not lost any of cryptomeria or metasequoia seedlings to damping off since I began using this, however, it is too early to tell whether this is significantly caused by the bacterium. As for fungicides for damping off, it seems that most damping off diseases are caused by the bastards in the infamous "water mold" (so called because their zoospores possess a flagella, like a sperm, and can only move in wet environments.) family, mentioned above. Namely pythium and phytophthora, mostly damping off seems to be pythium, though. I've heard botrytis species referred to as potential damping-off culprits, as well. Whatever species causes damping off, the fungus literally eats the plant (secretes enzymes that digest the plant tissue) at the soil line, causing the seedling to keel over but for the parts of the plant above the infected spot to still appear healthy for a short time until they die of starvation/desication, etc. Barbara, here's some pictures again of the mycorrhizae that somehow inoculated that cupressus macrocarpa that I had to dig up because it got too big...

If it was crown rot it probably would have killed the whole plant last year. Southern Blight can do it, but it is more treatable and attacks the leaves at ground level in a hot humid environment. It attacks at the base of individual leaves; The reason I am saying this, is that I see a lot of individual leaves pulled out. With Crown Rot you will generally get the whole eye popping off as a unit, as the infection is deeper into the crown. Also I think I see little orange balls (out of focus) which are diagnostic for Southern Blight. They are about 1 mm or less in size. Dave