My raspberries are in sandy soil and I didn't water them at all until the big heat waves of the past ~5 weeks, and they've done splendidly. Once the drought and heat hit for a while, I've been watering them about twice a week and they are still healthy. So I wonder if you've been watering just way too much. They don't need a ton of water. They're much more robust than, say, pumpkins or peas, which start looking really bad if you don't water them at least once a day if not twice a day.

We don't have it here, but the next-door county does. 8-( I have friends in Chicago who fifty years ago lost the elms that lined their street. Then decades later they happened to live on the original block for the Asian longhorn beetle infestation: they lost every tree on the block except a lone conifer. I never expected anything like that here.

Yep, a depressing time to be a gardener for sure. Almost all roses are doomed, too, by rose rosette disease. Supposely 'Justin Brouwers' (sp?) is possibly resistant to boxwood blight. And fortunately I have a few of them. Strangely enough a huge Buxus 'harlandii' of mine died over the course of the last 2 years; it was my oldest plant that I'd had since my teens and moved from garden to garden. But I'm almost certain it wasn't because of blight because when I removed it, I saw 2 very healthy seedlings under it! I think it might have died because of a few ill-informed herbicide applications on my part. It would be the first unintentional death of this type on my part though, so I'm just considering it a learning experience and moving on. I'd been using Redeem because that's what was once sold to me at Lesco when I asked for triclopyr. But little did I know/notice it also has clopyralid it in, which is far more toxic and can kill plants via their roots as well as their leaves. I had to frequently spray around the Buxus because violets were a real problem in that area. I suspect enough trickled down into the soil that it killed off the shrub. I will, needless to say, never buy that again. Regular triclopyr in formulations w/o clopyralid is useful for getting Labiatae out of areas planted with bulbs. It doesn't affect the monocots, or only minimally. Redeem also seems to seriously disturb legumes, if it is sprayed anywhere in their rootzone. . This post was edited by davidrt28 on Wed, Oct 22, 14 at 15:10

Heruga!!! the root rot organisms in your garden are cosmopolitan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitan_distribution They were there before you got there, and will be after you leave. Is it likely there are certain species or strains they are more or less virulent and more or less likely to be found in certain gardens of the east coast...yes...possible. But for example with the dreaded 'sudden oak death', we can be sure with a reasonable degree of certainty, that biosecurity methods kept it from becoming established in the east coast. For now at least. There's no need to worry about where your soil goes. It's not 'contaminated' with anything. You're acting as though there's plutonium in there or something. I used to think that the reason a plant like, say, Rhododendron rex would die for me when it was planted out in the garden was because my soil contain these naturally occurring root rot organisms and the 'sterile' planting media the plant was grown in did not. Although this is probably true, I now have a better understanding that the soil to container soil interface is another factor at play. When a plant grown in peat/perlite is planted in clay soil, the 'potting soil' mix can become a void or bathtub that stays wetter than the surrounding soil. (this is also why it's bad to 'amend' a planting hole) Let's time warp back to 2011 - maybe if I had told myself, when planting the large rex I bought onsite at RSF and brought to my MD garden, to splay the root mass four ways and sort of sit them on top of my existing soil - rather than just plant the 3+ gallon pot slightly higher than the existing soil level - it would have survived, at least longer. May not have mattered, as 2011 was the year when I had my worst rains ever. Over 30 inches in the 40 days surrounding Hurricane Irene. The rex had survived the hot summer up to that point, it was the massive amounts of rain that catalyzed the root rot to kill it. FWIW I have used this for potting rot sensitive plants (well, most of my plants TBH) in the past few years...https://www.pthorticulture.com/en/products/pro-mix-hp-biofungicide-plus-mycorrhizae/ but I cannot say for sure whether it makes a huge difference. It surely can't hurt. Do I seem to have fewer deaths from root rot than I used to? Yes. But I do various other things differently than I used to. I still lose plants once in a while. I recently lost for example, all 3 (BVT X mac) X sinofalconeri seedlings I tried in one area, while (Catfortcampy X mac) X sinofalconeri survived. I attribute this to Catfortcampy probably having slightly better genes for root rot resistance. Why? It's a swarm/grex, rather than a single species. And 2 of the species, our native catawbiense and the Asian fortunei, are very root rot resistant. Camforest used to sell R. fortunei as "rhododendron able to grow in [piedmont] North Carolina" although that probably isn't true of all clones of it. Lastly, Gable would have been selecting, whether inadvertently or purposely but probably the latter, for root rot resistance when he selected clones from that cross. Because he was trying to get the yellow of campylocarpum without the notorious root rot sensitivity of those high altitude Asian elepidotes like that one and the closely related wardii.