Hi, I am interested in the tomatoes,peppers, and the gourds. I have some of the herbs that you want and also some hen and chicks. Let me know if this would be a good trade for you, Suzy

Look at the photo link below. Note the drying edge that is curling upward. One of the fastest ways to help is probably to use fish emulsion. You can dilute it and spray/pour it on the leaves, and/or pour some around the roots. Fish Emulsion also has nitrogen, potash, and many micronutrients, all good for the plants and the soil. Sue Here is a link that might be useful: Potassium deficiency photo

From years of experience at letting squash get too dry during the dog days of summer, I find it hard to imagine that letting one get too dry once or twice would kill a plant that quickly. When my squash plants get too dry, they might wilt and have a leaf yellow and look kind of pathetic but I've never seen them get so dry that they died quickly without me having a chance to try to save them. I am not saying it cannot happen, just that when they are grown in the ground, I never see that happen. Last year my plants in the ground went a month with no irrigation and maybe a quarter-inch or half-inch of rainfall and they didn't die. However, yours are in containers, so it is hard to say how long they could handle being too dry. The plants in the ground can stretch their roots and search for water. The plants in containers can not since they are limited to the soil-less mix in the container.. As a long-time gardener, I am sure you know that every plant has a certain wilt point beyond which it can not recover, so if yours reached that wilt point before you discovered the plant was too dry and watered it, then being too dry could have killed it. I still think it is a pest or disease problem. There are so very many diseases that will get them, and often it is bacterial wilt which is vectored by insects. If the plant is dead, you can slice open the stem to look for any evidence of SVBs. When I lose a squash plant to a disease, it is almost always bacterial wilt. When I lose one to disease, it is always SVBs, not squash bugs. Your mileage may vary. You can do whatever you wish to your squash stems, and the SVBs will find a way around it, sooner or later, in 99.9999% of the cases. They are that good at what they do. They have to be, since it is all about survival for them. I don't care what you wrap them in, what you bury stems under, etc. there is no way that you can give the squash plants 100% protection from SVBs in our climate, short of raising them in a high tunnel or under floating row covers. Even when you do that, you have to take extraordinary precautions to keep the SVBs out of the high tunnel or to exclude them from the low tunnels. There's too many SVBs, our season for them is very long, and they are remarkably good at seeking out, finding and destroying squash plants. I have been able to keep squash plants alive until August some years by wrapping stems, but other years they hit the plants around the third week of June and the wrapped stem does not deter them since they just enter the main stem higher up where it is not wrapped or the egg is laid on a leaf and the tiny cats tunnel into the stem right where the leaf petiole attachs to the stem. Bacterial wilt and squash wilt seem like they hit like a bolt from the blue, but if you observe your plants carefully, day in and day out, you sometimes realize that the plant had started to discolor slightly and look a little less happy a week or two before it wilted, browned and died. Sometimes you only realize that in hindsight, but other times you say it happening right in front of your eyes, and you sigh and shrug and say "oh well" because you know it has BW and you know it is just a matter of time before the plant dies. From infection to death might take as long as 2 weeks. Squash plants are susceptible to other diseases too including fusarium wilt, verticillium wilt and phytopthora root rot. My theory is that this is why seed packets contain 20 or 30 or more seeds--so you can be raising replacement plants all along as you're waiting for disease or SVBs to kill the current ones. Most summer squash plants don't live long enough to die of old age. For anyone reading this who wonders how commercial growers raise squash successfully while we home gardeners have so much trouble with squash bugs, SVBs and diseases, they have access to all kinds of heavy-duty fungicides and pesticides that are not available to home gardeners, and often those are systemic which is why they work so well. Dawn

William, Because soil friability and drainage varies, and because water percolates down into the soil and evaporates from the soil at different rates, no one can tell you how to water on a 'schedule'. Every one of us on this forum probably has to water our gardens at different rates and for different time frames because our soil and our weather varies. All I can tell you is to keep the soil evenly moist. My peppers get one good soaking weekly from a soaker hose and I water them until the soil is moist about 6" down. How long that takes will vary depending on how dry the soil was when I started, etc. My peppers are in heavy red clay that has been very heavily amended for 10 years with lots of organic material, so it is fairly ideal soil in that it holds moisture pretty well but also drains well because it is a raised bed. I would put all the peppers in the same bed because they do have similar fertility and water needs. Last year was just your 'lucky' year and either the aphids didn't find your plants, or you had 'clean' aphids that hadn't picked up any diseases yet to vector, or your pepper plants had great disease-resistance. This year, your luck ran out. If crookneck squash are falling off, that usually means pollination failed to occur, which is puzzling since the zucchni are pollinating just fine. However, there are a couple of other things it could be as well. First, if by chance, you planted your crookneck squash early and the plants were exposed to very cool temperatures for a few days, that can cause them to be stunted and nonproductive for their entire life. Secondly, it might be one of the rot diseases that sometimes appear on squash and, if it is, it likely is choanephora fruit rot. You'll see this rot in high heat, high humidity conditions. With it, you'll see immature fruit form but then shrivel, turn a very light tannish-brown and will decay or rot. Once this happens, there is not much you can do. There are no organic or chemical controls for this. I just remove and compost all the bad squash, cut back on moisture if possible, and hope that the next squash that pollinate don't have the same issues. To prevent this kind of rot on future plants, plant in raised beds which drain more quickly so the plants don't stay too wet, space the plants far apart to allow for good air circulation, and water less often, preferably with drip irrigation or soaker hoses that put the water into the soil and not on the leaves. Once again, my squash plants get watered once a week deeply and that's it. To much moisture causes all kinds of issues in a veggie garden and I go to the opposite extreme and probably keep my garden a bit too much on the dry side to avoid the diseases. To return to the pollination issue, be sure you're seeing bees and that pollination is occurring. It could be you had bees, they pollinated the zucchini squash and then something happened to the bees and they didn't come back and pollinate the crookneck. Be sure you aren't using any insecticides that might have killed or discouraged the bees. The female blossoms have tiny squash at the end of each blossom. If they aren't being pollinated, they'll turn brown and fall off. The difference in fruit drop caused by a lack of pollination versus fruit rot is that the baby squash don't enlarge and just brown/fall off if it is a lack of pollination, but the fruit begin to enlarge and grow some before turning brown and falling off if it is fruit rot. Dawn