"Thank you for the reply! So, you don't think it's some kind of blight or fungus?" I do not live in the East. I am in the Northwest so others may know more about blight than I. Would it be a strange year that a blight for basil and a blight for peppers affected your crops at the same time? - Is there such a blight that would affect both crops? If it were a fungal disease (other than a blight) would it have affected two very different plant species in nearly identical ways and within a very short period of time? Both potted and in the ground? You are having higher than normal temperatures. Your plants in the ground and in containers are suffering. Unless you sprayed your vegetables with roundup , quintupled any fertilizer recommendation, or watered them like they were aquatic plants, the soil temperature is still my best guess. Don't give up on everything that you have done in the past - sometimes strange things happen! There is still time this year to adapt and overcome - it is a lot easier to plan for a fall crop without having to wait for the space to open up and IMHO it is easier to care for a pepper or tomato transplant in the ground rather than in a pot. Best of Luck!

I push the soil down solidly around the plants then water heavily. You need to fill the cavities the moles or gophers have made under the plants with dirt. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Seems to depend on how dry the roots get before I try to save them. Even if you save them, the moles will come back unless you trap them. Gophers might behave differently, but moles like the moist soil and worms that live in it.

We visited the Montreal Botanical Garden several years ago and talked with Claire LeBerge. In her old rose collection there was a rose that was dieing quickly of a wilt. She knew the disease and called it Flettriseur bacterian (I'd bet I've mispelled that) and what she does is remove the rose and replace it. You could ask a local plant pathologist or someone with AgCanada to send stems and leaves to the folks at Guelph who are the specialists to see if they can identify it. I wish I could be more specific. But if the info is out there, I haven't been able to pull it up through our library access.

Sounds like a great project, Ian! I have seen histories of horticulture for California, but not for here. One factor in plants dropping from nursery inventory is patents. If a nursery has a choice between propagating a common, older, unpatented variety and a newer patented one that they'll get a royalty from, they go with the one that will bring in extra income in the form of royalty payments. So you'll see an old rhodie or rose cultivar drop off the market and be replaced by a practically identical-looking, newer, patented cultivar. How plants respond to propagation methods matters too in what stays in the trade and what disappears. Market forces, same thing that's pushing out indie nurseries in favor of big box stores, require that plants be propagated on a large scale and all the same way. Plants that require specialty treatment tend to get dropped from inventories because they're more expensive to propagate, and you can't always recoup those costs if the customers won't pay more. I have noticed that the indie nurseries that used to propagate their own material, aren't anymore. It's become too expensive, much cheaper to just buy stuff in from the large producers. Retailers buy finished plants, and the production nurseries buy in rooted cuttings and tissue-cultured plantlets, and that narrows selection. Hammond's Acres of Rhodies still propagates his own stuff from his own mother plants, so he has rhodies no one else carries anymore. Some of the very oldest garden plants in this area, were selected because they could survive the long slow arduous journey cross continent in a wagon train, and were worth carrying all that distance. Plants that came a little later had to survive onboard a sailing ship from China or through the Panama Canal. Not an issue in our selection anymore. And some of those older, easy to transport plants have turned out to be invasive! like Gardener's Garters, purple loosestrife, and now butterfly bush. Other plants aren't worth a nursery's time because they're so easy to propagate that no one will pay money for them, like walking iris, nigella, common bearded iris, and robinia. These are 'pass along' plants. You have to have a really special cultivar of these to get anyone to pay for them. I have grown a lot of different roses over the years (decades ...) and while I adore the old garden roses I have learned to prefer the brand-new cultivars for many reasons. Better disease resistance in the newer roses, and I mean the very newest ones, like less than 10 years old. Better production, and the flowers have more substance now. They last longer, and hold up to rain and thrips better. I grew some of the earliest hybrid tea varieties for a while and while the individual flowers are gorgeous they just don't cut it in the garden compared to the new stuff. Flowers ball in the slightest bit of humidity, and fall apart as soon as they reach their peak. And the plants need much more work - more watering, more fertilizing, more spraying, than the roses that have been coming on the market in the past few years. I used to grow a rose called 'Amelia Earhart', which is a cultivar from the 1930s I think. Absolutely drop-dead gorgeous flowers, and knock-your-socks-off fragrant, but I only got ONE good flower, maybe TWO, per year. It never put out many flowers to start with, and most of them had some kind of damage from rain or dew or insects, and many never even opened all the way before falling apart. I babied that rose for years before chucking it. Same problems with the old polyantha 'Clothilde Souperb'. Compare that to 'Memorial Day', a new cultivar, which is equally gorgeous and fragrant, and I get dozens of perfect huge flowers off of it every year, with just routine watering and feeding, and I don't really need to spray it at all. Amazing what 100 years of hybridizing can do, isn't it?