Episode 9: What’s Eating My Plants & Potato Sprouting Tips

Dave in Zone 7 

A: Dave, start with proper nutrition. Get a soil test to see where your soil is.

• Then select resistant varieties like this Buffalosun, or Ruby Dawn, or Ruby Monster are a few Gurney’s has, but you want to look for resistance to late blight, early blight, and septoria leaf spot (a common fungal disease).   
• Next, practice crop rotations. If your garden's big enough, plant in a different area every year. This will help with the build-up of diseases in one area.
• Next space your tomatoes is far apart as you can in your garden to give them the best airflow possible. Don't plant them next to something tall like corn or sunflowers. They need good airflow to evaporate the dew and rain off them. 
• Get rid of any weeds. There are several weeds related to tomatoes that can transmit diseases too. 
• Mulch is great for a variety of reasons, but it keeps rain from splashing on the soil, that splashes soil up into the plant, which sometimes can carry these soil-borne diseases.  
• If you do start getting some infections, usually it starts from the bottom and works its way up, so remove lower leaves. 
• Don't mess around with wet foliage when your tomatoes are wet. There are some preventative sprays like Soap-Shield® Flowable Liquid Copper Fungicide or Garden SentinelTM Organic Broad-Spectrum Biofungicide. They're very environmentally friendly.  
• When the season is over, remove all your plant material, all your tomatoes, peppers and eggplants and potatoes, get them all out of the garden. 

Shop Gurney’s tomatoes and Gardens Alive! all-natural pest control 

Christine in Zone 7 

A: Christine, I used to suffer this malady myself.  

• Once you plant that seed or plant, immediately cover it with insect fabric, the lightweight insect barrier. This will keep the adult moths from laying their eggs on the stem. 
• Next, you can spray the stem. There are several environmentally-friendly products, like something that has Spinosad, and all you have to do is spray the stem. (Spinosa is derived from fermented soil bacteria, creating an effective and natural insecticide a highly widely used in organic gardening to control pests without harming beneficial insects.) 
• Another thing I've been doing the last several years that shows promise is I stake the zucchini plant, and keep tying it up, so it's just straight up and down. There's anecdotal evidence that the borers don't like that.  
• Also, the borers only have a few broods every year. So you can keep planting, like once a month plant another batch, and just keep going like that. I do that anyway, regardless of borers. 

If you practice these things you’ll have much better luck. 

Shop Gurney’s zucchini and summer squash and plant supports 

Jason in Zone 7  

A: Oh, Jason, we get a chuckle out of chitting, so excuse us here. Chitting will help significantly improve your potato stand.  

And just to explain what chitting is: you get your seed potatoes and they have no sprouts. So four weeks prior to planting put them in a warm, dark place, and once they start sprouting (showing little eyes), put them in a bright, cool, sunny location. That will kind of harden those eyes off and they won't get elongated. 

As an alternative, you can just warm the potatoes up real well before you plant them. Not in the oven or anything, but just warm them up at room temperature, and that really has been shown to help, too.  

One customer was worried that their sprouts were black. Well, some potato varieties we offer, the purple potatoes especially, the sprouts will be very dark when you shoot them, so no worries, you'll be good. 

Shop seed potatoes for your garden