Another year or two later....I acquired the pollinator Chiquita for my two Onandagas, and I have to strongly recommend Chiquita. It is ever so much more attractive through to winter whereas the Onandagas look "fried" by mid-summer - I just can't keep them watered enough. Chiquita sets more fruit also, though disappointingly, not a lot of fruit set. I think it's because the two barely overlap in bloom.

This is a wonderful post, thank you. Just want to be clear, though, because Friday, I noticed my clematis 'Silmakivi' (Gr. III, which had just begun to bloom the day before!) was suddenly limp and droopy...wilted. I just put it into the ground last summer (perhaps late spring, don't recall). So, based on this thread, this could be due to its vine (which is gigantic already, about 3'!) is overwhelming the still-young root structure, and I should cut off the wilted vine? There's a very small one at the base; may I let that one be? Thanks so much for your help. None of my mother's clematis ever did this that I can recall. Also, should I pinch back all the flower buds as well when the vine comes back? Thanks so much, all! I really appreciate your help. (Love 'Silmakivi', too, it's lovely.)

Verticillium wilt is very present in PNW soils......it is a pretty common problem and seems to affect Japanese maples more so than most other species. To answer your questions.....you can have it tested and confirmed if you wish but it is not absolutely necessary if you are feeling relatively secure in your diagnosis. The second tree may not be infected. VW is an opportunistic pathogen and typically infects trees that are stressed or damaged for some reason. It is quite possible to have a second JM or other susceptible species close by that is untouched and often will remain so. Species that are not as prone to VW as Japanese maples and older, very well-established trees can often survive the disease long term with only partial dieback, provided proper care is given. I have yet to see a JM infected with VW in our area survive very long, so forget the 'management" approach. It just doesn't work with a Japanese maple :-) Typically, VW is extremely fast acting with Japanese maples, with the entire tree dying in a matter of days. It will not hurt at this point to take a wait and see approach with the affected tree - significant dieback that is present in spring (by failure to leaf out) may or may not indicate imminent death. Usually, VW and the very rapid decline shows up in mid to late summer, but with the extremes our weather has demonstrated over the past couple of years, these early season signs of the disease are becoming more prevalent. If the disease is confirmed, the tree should be removed, but I'd be extremely careful about root removal. If there is any chance the roots of the problem tree have intermingled with the nearby healthy (so far) tree, leave them alone and in place. Again, VW is present in most NW soils so it is very likely the pathogen is throughout your garden. But it is typically present in an inactive or dormant state unless stimulated into activity by root damage, mechanical damage or excessive stress. If planted carefully, given proper care and good garden sanitation adhered to, there is no certainty any other susceptible tree or shrub on your property will contract the disease. In my old garden, I lost two trees to VW, one in the front and one in the backyard. Since they were never present in the garden during the same time period, there was no chance one could have infected the other. VW susceptible species were planted close to both but were never infected either. But I never disturbed the root systems - the one in front (a JM) I cut down and the young western redbud in back I just left in place as a vine support until it finally rotted away. It is disturbing to lose a valuable and well-loved tree to this disease. But it did not discourage me from adding additional VW susceptible plants to my garden, however any new Japanese maples I did confine to containers to reduce any further possibility of problems. That became the start of a rather large collection of containered JM's, which I was able to take with me when I moved. Wouldn't have been able to do that had they been planted in the ground, so there's a bit of a silver lining in any dark cloud :-)

The first two photos show spider mite damage. The second two photos also show something else along with it, likely a bacterial or fungal disease--and there are many that it could be. Early Blight isn't the only option when plant foliage is diseased. First of all, anything you use to attempt to control spider mites is going to be most effective if you begin using it at the very first sign of an infestation. Once plants are heavily infested, as yours are, it is going to be difficult to win the war with the spider mites. I first started seeing spider mites the last week of March or the first week in April, and had limited success knocking back their population at that time. However, I've been gardening a long time and dealing with spider mites a long time and in a hot, dry summer, I know from experience they are very hard to control, especially if you prefer to garden organically, so I expected they'd kill my plants by the end of July, and that still is likely to happen. By then, I won't care, for various reasons. If I was just walking into my garden and noticing spider mites today, many of the best solutions could not be used because the high temperatures at our house are above 90 degrees every day, and 90 degrees is the threshold at which many remedies will burn your tomato plant foliage and damage it, up to and including damage severe enough to kill the plants. While it is possible to blast the spider mites off the back of the leaves with a sharp spray of water, that is a temporary fix at best. I have found they keep coming back. Sometimes spraying the leaves weekly with liquid seaweed seems to keep their population in check. Spraying with insecticidal soap or neem oil every 7-10 days while high temperatures are below 90 degrees seems to work fairly well. If you have a small number of plants, Take Down spray is fairly effective. Dusting them with sulphur helps up to a point, but less so in hot weather because sulphur combined with hot weather can damage the plants too. When temperatures remain below 90 degrees, you can spray with a summerweight/superfine oil spray meant to be used in warm temperatures. This is the summertime equivalent of dormant oil, but while it is useful in warmer temperatures, I likely wouldn't attempt to use it when the high temps are exceeding 90 degrees. Even miticides and the few insecticides that may be effective on spider mites can damage tomato plant foliage if used at high temperatures or if sprayed excessively. Be careful about using insecticides like Sevin and Malathion, as well as any other broad-spectrum pesticide, whether it is synthetic or organic in nature. Sevin is well-known to cause increases, not decreases, in the spider mite population. It does this in two ways. First, it kills off the beneficial insects, including predatory mites, that help you by controlling spider mites. Secondly, when exposed to Sevin, spider mites speed up their reproduction and produce more eggs, hence more mites. While Malathion is often recommended for spider mites, and some people report success with it, others report that it, like Sevin, seems to give them more spider mites, not less. Because I prefer to garden as organically as possible and avoid the spraying of broad-spectrum chemical pesticides at all costs, I'd never use Malathion nor would I recommend it to anyone else.(That doesn't mean I am saying the previous person gave you bad advice by recommending Malathion, just that it is a recommendation I wouldn't make. Different strokes for different folks.) One reason I raise vegetables is so we can have organic produce raised without the use of synthetic chemicals. That's just me though. Some folks use Malathion and it doesn't bother them to do so, and that's their choice. You should know that if you apply too much malathion to your plants at high temperatures, it can burn the foliage and kill the plants. If you choose to use it, read the label very carefully and follow all recommendations precisely. One reason to avoid broad-spectrum pesticides is that they kill the beneficial insects that help you control the pest insects. I watched this first-hand when I was a child and my dad battle spider mites (unsuccessfully) every single summer of my life. The more he sprayed, the worse the mites got. His best friend had identical results. So, even though I was a kid, I understood that Kelthane and Sevin and Malation and other similar pesticides were not helpful in our garden in dealing with spider mites. Now that I am older, I understand that it is because they also killed the beneficial insects, and of course, now we have the research that shows the chemicals can sometimes make the spider mite population explode, and we didn't know that then. Later in his life, when he was in his 60s or 70s, my dad became almost totally organic and...guess what happened....he stopped losing his tomato plants to spider mites every summer. It was fairly amazing and he sure wished he'd given up the synthetic chemicals a few decades earlier. Your garden is an ecosystem, and within it you will have good bugs and bad bugs. Most of the time, with most pest insects, you already have beneficial insects in your garden that help control them, assuming you haven't wiped out the beneficial insect population by spreading broad-spectrum insecticides. There are specific beneficial insects you can purchase and release to help control spider mites, but many of them need cooler air temperatures and higher humidity than what we have now. They are a great spring solution to knock down the population in April or May, and sometimes in early June, if June is cooler than average and wet. You shouldn't release beneficial insects, though, if you intend to use pesticides. If you do not have pet cats, pyrethrums and permethrins may be effective on spider mites, but I won't use them because of their side effects on cats, and perhaps on people. Just because something is organic rather than synthetic in origin doesn't mean it is safe. Rotenone is another organic product I've never used and never will use because of its side effects. Sulphur is often very effective on spider mite populations when sprayed early, as soon as they are seen, but it can damage plants in high temperatures. If you find the infestation in a year when the weather is milder or if you'd observe it earlier in the year, there are various beneficial insects that you can buy and release to help you control spider mites. However, most of them need cooler temperatures and higher humidity than most of Oklahoma is experiencing now. They would have been a great possible solution in April or May. How well you are able to battle spider mites will also depend on your weather and on your location. In a more urban environment where spider mite populations may be lower, they sometimes are easier to fight. When I lived in a 50-year-old neighborhood in Fort Worth, we had them pretty much every summer to some degree, but not to the huge extent that I see them here in rural southern Oklahoma. Even if there was a magic potion that I could spray that would kill every single one of the spider mites in my veggie garden, it would not be helpful because I am surrounded by thousands of acres of mixed pastureland/woodland heavily infested with them. I could kill a million of them in my garden, and a billion more would move in the next day. Sometimes you have to pick your battles, and with spider mites, the earlier you discover them and choose to battle them, the higher the rate of success. Once the high temps are over 90 degrees, the available arsenal of weapons decreases and the mites reproductive ability increases. They can reproduce about three times as fast in hot weather as in cooler weather. In weather as hot as it is now, I choose to do nothing about them. Nothing is going to be effective enough in the weather we're having now, and even if it was, the other tomato pests like stink bugs and blister beetles are showing up and doing enough damage that it almost makes the spider mites irrelevant. I grow tons of tomatoes every year and I love, love, love them. However, I choose what pests and diseases are worth fighting at various times (based on degree of success, safety and other pests found at the same time), and for me, fighting spider mites in July is a battle I don't fight because of the heat and other pests. I just keep picking tomatoes for as long as I'm getting them, and I put in new plants for fall. Fall tomato plants usually can fight off the spider mites. By the time the fall plants go into the ground, the spider mite population usually has peaked and is beginning to decrease. At least that is what I have observed here. Also, new fresh plants have increased vigor because of their youth and will overcome issues that are devastating to older, stressed plants. I staggered my tomato plants this year. The first container plantings were done the third week in February. The first in-ground plants went into the ground on March 12th-13th. The last tomato plants went into the ground and containers the last week in April or first week in May. In my garden, the older the plant right now, the worse it looks. The younger plants are fighting the diseaes and pests much better than the plants that are older. So, as I finish harvseting the bulk of the crop, I'll pull out the older plants. Eventually they'll all be gone, but by then I'll have fall tomatoes. As for disease symptoms, often they appear at the same time you're battling pests, which can make a precise disease diagnosis difficult. If your leaves turned a bright yellow in patches or splotches before turning brown and drying out, it could be one of the two kinds of powdery mildew we have here. It generally does not produce white fungal growth that is as obvious as the other form of PM. This year I had a lot of it develop in latest May/earliest June when rain was falling. The yellow patches on the leaves were larger than the ones you'll see in the link, and I didn't see a lot of white sporulation, likely because we got too hot very quickly for it to thrive after the rain stopped falling. See the link below. I didn't spray for it, and it killed some plants. Others, though, put out new growth and are rebounding nicely. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: TAMU Tomato Problem Solver