Sorry about that Karyn, and hopefully the sun will shine for you soon and dry up all that moisture. First I got those green beetles that look like the Japanese beetle and they feasted on my apples; now I see small yellow with black beetles on the brugs and they are feasting on the leaves and multiplying like crazy.

Your Drowning and I am still coughing up dust!!! What a Crazy yr!!!!!

Kylie

Karyn, I'm in 7a too, and I can confirm the damp and nasty! Not only outside but in the house too because it's too cool for the AC, too warm for the heat, and all the doors are sticking -- I'm afraid to close the downstairs bathroom door all the way because I might get stuck in there.

But so far no bugs, fungus or anything nasty on the brugs, although they haven't bloomed as freely as usual this summer.

Karyn
I have had a couple Brugs that look bad also, Thank goodness for Forbid, I think it's been a bad year, last year I had a bunch of Figs, this year I only had 3, but my
Peach tree was loaded, I put up 6 bags of Peaches in the freezer, I do hope you have some Sunshine, Before winter
sets in
Elizabeth

Surprisingly the brugs probably look beast out of all my plants. Passies and MG's are suffering with terrible black spot or a similar fungus. Brug blooms are getting kind of slimy well before they drop which is gross. The sun peeked out yesterday evening and I was so excited thinking that today would be nice but no....... mostly cloudy and showers in the foreseeable forecast : (

As I've posted before, I do my gardening at my parents house because I live in an apartment... here in CO we had a 3/4 week period over the summer that was REALLY wet.

I saw plants that NEVER get diseases eventually curl up and die with fusarium wilt. Agastashe rupestris (sunset hyssop), Mirabilis multiflora (wild four o'klocks), and some varieties of Verbascum died! These are all things that are listed as immune to disease.

Iris leaf spot also wiped out a huge crop of iris and day lilly leaves (luckily the plants did not die) but I have never seen those problems in Colorado before.

But I noticed something: every spot that was troubled was a spot that had been exposed, months earlier, to roundup to control weeds. One was a newly-planted garden that was previously a "wild" weedy area of mostly non-native plants, that was knocked down with roundup a year before, and others were in areas that were spot-treated.

About half of the tomato plants died of wilt; they were also in an area that had been treated with roundup in the spring to clear the weeds before they were planted.

I admit some bias: I've always been skeptical of using herbicides and would never have used it to begin with if I had my way. My dad, I think, just enjoys watching the weeds curl up and die days/weeks after spraying them, and it's h is house and I don't even live there so I have no control over that. But I've always felt that hoeing weeds, planting new plants there, then smothering or pulling the weeds as they re-emerge, results in healthier plants than when they are planted in a "sterile" plant-free area, but I never knew why.

I got suspicious that perhaps the round-up had something to do with the diseases. I remembered a documentary about how round-up ready transgenic crops were developed; the documentary said round-up also kills bacteria, but in a waste site where roundup products were frequently dumped, a resistant strain of bacteria was discovered growing. Researchers cultivated the bacteria and got the gene they eventually inserted into plants.

Well if round-up kills bacteria, could it be killing lots of "beneficial" organisms in the soil and leaving room for bad ones to move in?

Sure enough, I looked up some studies and found that crops treated with roundup are much more vulnerable to fusarium wilt. I also found that micorrhizal relationships are destroyed by the chemical when it gets into the soil, which hurts surrounding plants.

So I'm going to see if I can "culture" the soil with micorrhizal cultures you can order online, and if that's too expensive, I'll just get some dirt from a healthy garden area and move it over, and discourage further roundup use to spot-treat the garden. I think that having healthy soil with a thriving backbone of beneficial fungus/bacteria really makes a difference getting plants through difficult weather periods.

That's one of the main reasons that I don't use herbicides/fungicides and I do innoculate most plants (soil and potting mixes) with micorrhizal fungi. There's enough chemicals leaching into the ground and I don't want to add to it. That being said I'm still dealing with terrible fungus issues but with the cooler temps and nothing having a chance to dry, including leaf litter, it's a breeding ground for fungus/disease. It's still raining or should I say storming. We are having a downpour right now. I walked my youngest to the bus stop and it looks like rivers running along the roadsides : (