How do you prevent plant diseases and pests in your garden? Organic fertilizer is the best way to control pests and diseases in your garden without harming the environment. Some plants are prone to getting...
Some plants are prone to getting certain diseases. It would be nice if the salesperson at the nursery or garden center would tell you these things. Obviously as a salesperson, your job is to say the good things about a plant, not the bad things! But any good nursery would hopefully not carry a lot of things that are prone to infestations. There are a lot of plants that are being developed to be more resistant to diseases and things of that nature. And what's become a real trend in the past few years is going back to really old-fashioned plants. What happened is that we took plants out of nature and did hybridizations to them to try to make the flowers bigger or make them smell better or to make them produce more fruit. But what we've done is weakened the plants by doing that, and the plants have become more prone to diseases or insect problems. So there's been this trend that probably started about 15 or 20 years ago, but has become more popular in the past five or six years, of going back to what we would call heirloom or antique varieties - the original plants that nature created - so that it's actually a hardier plant than the hybrids. That's true in some cases, but there are some hybrids, too, that are stronger and more resistant.
Those things aside, I think the best preventive thing you can do for plants is to feed them well with high-quality, organic fertilizers. I equate that to the difference between somebody that eats good, home-cooked, well-prepared food versus someone who eats fast food all the time. And then my biggest secret would be liquified seaweed - a foliar feeding during the spring with liquid seaweed. The reason is that liquefied seaweed contains a very high level of potassium silicate, which is what plants use to build their cell walls. If you give them this in abundance, on their leaves, regularly throughout the growing season, it will make their cell walls thicker and stronger. A lot of the diseases that plants get, fungal diseases in particular, are diseases that grow on the leaf and root into the cells. If those cell walls are thick and strong, they can't do that. Also, most of the insects that attack plants will pierce into the stem or leaf of the plant and suck the chlorophyll out. Again, if the cell wall is thick and strong, they can't do that.
