Oh and to answer your question I have been feeding them miracle grow once a week. That's what I suspected and that is where all the salt damage is coming from. No garden vegetable requires weekly feeding unless it is grown in a container and then only in a well diluted form. And no garden vegetable with the exception of leafy greens like lettuce/chard/spinach requires such high dose nitrogen feeding, much less on a weekly basis. MG and fertilizers like it are ok when used properly. When used excessively the massive amounts of salts they contain build up on the leaves and in the soil. The symptoms on the plants are excessively dark green leaves, burned crispy leaf edges and bleached inter-veinal patches in the leaf tissue. As the leaf tissue is destroyed then bacteria and fungi move in on the destroyed leaf tissues and that is what the yellow patches in the cuke leaf pic might be. Look on the underside of that leaf. If there are black patches of mold or white fuzzy/furry growths then disease is starting. If not then they are just salt damaged patches that haven't faded to white yet. Since these plants are apparently in ground, reduce your MG use to no more often than monthly and preferably no more than every 6 weeks and focus on applying it to the soil and root area, not the leaves. Hope this helps. Dave.

Hi Lis! I can't help with suggestions of where to go since I'm a west coaster. But I can completely and wholeheartedly agree with Laura and Gin. Take lots of xanax, valium or something similar. If you don't want to take it, slip it into the kids' juice. And start planning a quiet, private, child-free trip NOW for you and Carlos for after your family vacation. Trust me, you will need one. I'm speaking from experience here..................... We took a 14 year old and two 19 year olds to Maui last year. They weren't nearly as annoying as younger kids and I still ran out of xanax before the trip was over. Luckily for me, a lady that worked at one of the galleries I visited several times while we were there felt my pain. She very kindly dipped into her personal valium stash (she needed them to deal with all those pesky tourists) and shared with me. She was my personal savior from that point on. I personally believe that vacations with children aren't vacations at all. They are some sort of cosmic penance for past transgressions.

Sounds like whitefly. NOT beneficial. But spraying around with pesticide won't really help you with them. In fact, use of broad-spectrum pesticides encourages them. You can set up sticky bright yellow things, which they will be drawn to. You can hose-wash. Oil sprays UNDER leaves will smother them. Hummingbirds love to eat them. Roses generally speaking do not host them. You will find their nests -- like strange white "mazes" on the underside of the leaves of host plants. Citrus trees, plumeria, begonias, fuchsias, geraniums, hibiscus, and brugmansias are some of the plants we have seen them colonize. You want to eliminate those nests, either with oil sprays, or just rubbing them away with your fingers. Jeri

Yes, they are mealy bugs. The first step is definitely to quarantine any affected plants. Make sure you really check all your plants, not just the ones where they are readily visible, because they can be expert hiders. Leaf or surface mealy bugs are different from root mealy bugs, but it is possible to have both. I would try pulling up a plant or two to check; if you don't see anything, you probably only have the surface bugs. Treatment can be a bit of a pain, but you can find lots of information on what solution to use on the forum. I have used a 50/50 water/alcohol mix with a squirt of dish soap, and I'm currently experimenting with Safer's Insecticidal Soap. So far it seems to be working well. Definitely make sure you spray and/or remove what you see, but I always like to spray the whole plant in case there are things I can't see going on. Because soaps and pesticides often work on certain, but not all, parts of the life cycle, you will have to do several treatments. The life cycle is around 3 weeks. I like to spray once every few days (spraying every day seems too hard on the plant, in my experience). Then, be sure to keep your plants quarantined for a few more weeks to be sure all the bugs are gone before you put them back with the rest of your collection. Good luck!