5 Tips For Preventing Plant Diseases

One of the biggest challenges that many vegetable gardeners face is fending off plant diseases. There are many factors that can contribute to plant diseases, such as cultivar type, weather, insect pests, and crop rotation just to name a few. Prevention can go a long way towards keeping diseases at bay. Becoming proactive in your garden defense is always much better than being reactive. Usually once a disease has started rearing its ugly head, it can be too late to control or eliminate it.

Here are some tips you can use in your garden to help prevent plant diseases.

1. Don’t crowd your plants – Plant them at recommended distances. It may look sparse to start with, but the recommendations keep full-grown plants in a healthy environment with plenty of air circulation, which will protect against many diseases.
2. Don’t reuse potting soil – This includes dumping soil from containers into a garden bed. Diseases lurk in the soil,and will infect the next plant that is grown in it.  You can actually sterilize soil by cooking it in the microwave. Cook on high for 90 seconds for every 2.2 pounds of soil. For information on making your own potting soil, check out How To Make Your Own Potting Soil
3. Clean and disinfect garden tools – That are used to care for, prune, or dig up a diseased plant. This will keep the disease from spreading to the next plant the tool comes in contact with. Use a 10% bleach solution or rubbing alcohol.
4. Keep plants dry – Obviously plants will get wet when it rains, but try to avoid watering overhead. Keeping leaves moist will promote disease. It’s best to water at the stem if at all possible.
5. Don’t walk through or work in wet gardens -  In a healthy garden this shouldn’t be much of a problem, but if you’re fighting a disease on any of your plants, the simple act of moving through the bed and touching first one plant and then another can infect a previously healthy plant.

If you would like more information about a few common plant diseases, please visit the Diseases page. If you have some plant disease prevention tips, please share them!