Hi Michelle - Welcome to your first year of gardening! First, did you harden off your seedlings before planting them in the ground? If not, your first task should be to search on "hardening off plants", very important. If you didn't gradually adjust them to the outdoors, your wind damage and wilting could be from moving the outside too quickly. As for the bug: definitely NOT a squash bug. Even blurry. The body shape and posture remind me of one of the flies. I can't think which one at the moment (and can't find my book), but that fly is either a good bug or a harmless one. For the leaf damage/holes, my guess would be slugs. With the rain, they have been atrocious in my garden. Go outside at night with a flashlight and check under the leaves. I used an iron phosphate based bate (Sluggo, etc) for the first time this year. It's organic, safe around pets and should only kill the slugs. Or, you can try cat food cans with beer. They love beer and drown in it. The small white spots could also be flea beetles. The more people I talk to in the Philadelphia area, the more stories I hear about really bad flea beetles this year. I should know what the white stuff is. I know I've seen it before. An chance of getting a less blurry picture? It can be tricky unless you have a macro function on your camera. My gut instincts are saying the fluff is from one of the trees that are pollinating right now. Just a note about your squash: it does not transplant well if the roots are disturbed, especially if it is big and root bound. You could try to transplant yours, but you may just want to direct seed in the garden. Good luck! Bellatrix

Solarization may help with Early Blight or other diseases but LATE Blight needs a host plant to survive... if you removed your plants, be sure you leave no signs of them, like leaves or fruit that may have fallen off... clean up any nightshade family weeds that may be around too. Here is the some of the latest FAQ about the northeast Late Blight problem... "Some plants may escape late blight if the pathogen does not get on them. However, the chances of this happening this year are very low based on the fact occurrence of late blight is very widespread very early in the summer growing season. " "This year there will be a lot of wind-dispersed spores with so many occurrences of late blight widely distributed in the eastern U.S. this early in the season. These spores can be moved long distances." 3. Can plants be saved in a garden once late blight starts to develop? This depends on amount of symptoms seen, type of symptoms, how early in disease development symptoms were found, environmental conditions, proximity to other gardens or farms where late blight is developing, and management steps being taken. It is more likely possible to save plants in a garden if when the first symptoms are found: 1. There are very few. 2. They are on the leaves and not stems. 3. The garden has been inspected very thoroughly on a frequent basis (preferably daily) and thus the symptoms are discovered shortly after they formed. 4. Conditions are expected to be hot with no rain or lengthy dew for a prolonged period. (uh-oh!) 5. There are no nearby places with late blight that could be a source for more spores. 6. Further development of late blight will be slowed by regularly removing affected tissue (daily cut off and bag, preferably during the day when plants are dry and there will be sunshine for several hours afterwards) and applying fungicides (minimum of weekly). Additionally, success is more likely if fungicides were applied before symptoms were seen (thus there will be fewer initial symptoms) and spray coverage is maximized by using a pressurized pesticide sprayer to plants that are trellised. Removing extra branches will also help. Realize that even with an ideal situation (all above conditions met) there is no guarantee that success will be achieved. Late blight is a very destructive and difficult to manage disease. Impact can be great considering that tomato fruit and potato tubers that become infected can quickly rot. Plants can be killed quickly when late blight is not managed. A spot (lesion) can form within 4 days of when a spore lands on a plant (even faster, less than 3 days, with one strain of this pathogen) and a day later be producing spores that can be dispersed by the wind to healthy plant tissue resulting in more spots within a few days. Lesions that develop on stems are especially destructive. Late blight is not like most other diseases (e.g. Septoria leaf spot and anthracnose) that you can live with unmanaged because the plants wont be killed and all fruit lost. Late blight needs to be aggressively managed not only to try to save plants in the garden but also to avoid having the affected plants serve as a source of inoculum (wind-dispersed spores) for other gardens and farms. Promptly remove affected plant tissue on a regular basis. Realize that when symptoms are first seen, all points of infection likely are not yet visible. There is a latent period of a few days between infection and when symptoms are visible. No fungicide can cure tissue that is already affected, and this tissue will produce more inoculum. " "Fungicides cannot cure a spot that has already developed (disease control in plants is very different from humans). This tissue will soon die, but before it does the pathogen will produce hundreds of spores. The more spores, the greater the odds some will be dispersed to plant tissue that has not received fungicide. It is difficult to achieve complete coverage of plant tissue with fungicide, especially when a contact* fungicide is used, even with the best farm sprayer. The underside of leaves is an especially difficult area to reach (the pathogen can infect through either surface), " "After about 7 days the concentration (dose) of many fungicides can be too low to be adequately effective. "

The insects in pics 2&3 look like giant bark aphids, Longistigma caryae. They don't normally infest cherries but perhaps the tree is stressed for another reason and is just vulnerable to insect predation. Typically any sort of garden treatment for aphids will control these pests - a strong steam of water, hort oil, neem oil, insecticidal soap, etc. I can't see the raised brown lesions well enough to determine if they are more than just normal cherry bark lenticels, although they look a bit too regularly spaced for lenticels. Is there any sign of a sawdust-looking substance at the base of the tree or hanging from any of these lesions? That could indicate borers, a common cherry issue. Is the tree otherwise healthy? Good foliage development, proper flowering, no stem or tip dieback? Black knot usually presents in the branches first and moves down into the trunk when the disease is well established. Any swollen, blackened nodes in visible in the branches?

If it is happening right now, it is the normal time of year for the greenery to die off for the winter. That is what mine look like when they die back for winter. In the past, when I have moved mature tree peonies, the above ground plant eventually died off and new scions pushed up out of the ground the next spring. There will be some normal die off of wood and just trim it off. Otherwise, let the foilage fall off.