Last week I shared how very pleased I am with how my
squashes are progressing this year. Now it's time to share one of the failures in the garden this summer. All of my eggplants are sick, very sick. They started off looking nice and healthy. Here they are in late June.
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| June 29 |
By late July they had grown quite a bit and were looking pretty much ok, but look way off on the left side where you can see a sickly leaf, it's brown at the end and the rest of it is yellowing and wilting. Look at that nice healthy looking plant in the foreground next to the purple basil.
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| July 20 |
Here it is yesterday. The creeping crud is moving it's way up the plant.
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| August 12 |
Here's another plant just a few days ago. It and all the rest of the eggplants have all the symptoms of
Verticillium Wilt. Do a web search for
Verticillium in eggplant and you'll find any number of photos showing eggplants that look like mine.
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| August 8 |
The first symptom was the wilting of leaves starting from the bottom of the plants. But not necessarily the entire leaf. The tips and/or the edges would wilt. The wilted parts would start to curl up and yellow and then turn crispy brown. Eventually the entire leaf turns brown and falls off.
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| August 8 |
As the disease progresses up the plant it kills the flowers.
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| August 8 |
The very first flowers to set have produced some decent fruits. One of the interesting things about
Verticillium is that it may not attack the plants right away. It often attacks just as the plants start to flower or it may even show up later just as the plants are full of fruits. It doesn't seem to affect the fruits that set before the plants become infected. I just harvested that eggplant on the left yesterday, it weighed about a pound and is a really nice quality eggplant. This is one of the less affected plants and has a few more fruits that have set.
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| August 12 |
You can see that all the plants are infected, there's wilting, yellowing, and crispy brown throughout the patch. There's just a few eggplants developing on the plants. I'm going to let them mature, harvest them, and then pull out the plants. These will not be going into the compost, they need to go into the garbage, be burned, or disposed of in another way to prevent spreading the fungus.
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| August 12 |
Verticillium can persist in the soil for up to
14 years without a host, so crop rotations aren't necessarily a solution. Soil solarization is one recommendation for treating the soil, but that's not very practical, I would have to take my entire garden out of production at the height of summer. There's some really nasty chemicals that conventional growers can use - also not an option for me. Actinovate is an OMRI listed fungicide that seems to have some effectiveness. I've given my plants a couple of soil drenches with it and the wilting has slowed down. I doubt that it will cure the problem though, I'm just buying some time so that I can get some sort of harvest before the plants die.
There are no know
Verticillium resistant eggplant varieties available so I can't resort to that fix. One option that I may experiment with next year is grafting. All solanaceous plants are hosts for
Verticillium, but there are resistant tomato varieties. Eggplants can be grafted onto tomato rootstocks and a resistant tomato rootstock can confer resistance to the eggplant graft.
Another option for growing eggplant in the future is growing them in containers using clean potting soil each year. This is a Sicilian eggplant that I'm trying to grow in a 5-gallon container. It has it's own woeful tale. It's tiny because it has been shrinking, it's had two major hits from
Odocoileus hemionus.
How
Verticillium got into my garden soil is a mystery, but the stuff gets around in a number of ways. It could have come in with infected soil, on contaminated seeds, in contaminated water, it can be transmitted by insects, and can even be airborne.
And the
Odocoileus hemionus problem? My fault once, the FedEx guy the other time, the gate was left open and she just walked right in and started to browse.
Thanks for showing how verticillium disease progresses, I'll have to pay more attention to my veggies, I may have had it all along but didn't recognized the symptoms, I just cut off the brown leaves and the plants kept on producing until I got tired of it and pull the plant.
ReplyDeleteGreat information on verticillium wilt. I find that information on pests and diseases is so much more helpful when it comes from actual gardeners' experiences, as what they see and experience is usually quite different from "textbook" cases. I actually noticed some wilting leaves on my eggplants just this morning - I thought perhaps the soil was too dry & was going to water them this afternoon. I'll have to go take another look to see if the leaves are dying off.
ReplyDeleteBummer n the sick eggplants. At least you are getting SOME eggplants. All I am getting is flowers, no fruit set yet. Fingers crossed.
ReplyDeleteToo bad. I don't know if I've ever had that in my garden or not. Sometimes things die on me and I haven't a clue as to why.
ReplyDeleteI've never seen verticillium wilt in eggplant and I bet you wish you hadn't either. I've had good luck with eggplants in containers though I haven't tried many of the larger fruited ones.
ReplyDeleteI can commiserate with your Odocoileus hemionus incidents. I have actually woke up in the middle of the night with one of those "did I close the garden gate?" thoughts. I get up and shine a light down there to calm my fears. I can just see all the varmints in there having a field day while I sleep!
Oops not sure if my comment went through. What a shame to have verticillium wilt. I lost dozens of tomato plants in 2013 to what I believed to be that same disease (but so many look the same, I could have been wrong). Luckily for me that they were all in containers so I tossed the soil and got new stuff the next year. You have a ton of experience, but in this case, I do hope you are mistaken as it is pretty hard to "fix" the soil as you've mentioned yourself.
ReplyDeleteThat's awful your eggplants were so big and lush when it hit. In your pictures it's easy to see how the disease travelled up the plants.
ReplyDeleteA friend grows her eggplants and peppers in styrofoam coolers and they do amazingly well. Her peppers set fruit when it's too hot for my in-ground plants to set and she doesn't get any pest problems.
Like capers, my efforts at growing eggplants don't work out at all. The plants just never take off, and what few fruits that do set are woefully small. Next year I'm trying something else....like grapes!
ReplyDeleteThat's a shame you are losing the eggplants. We have plenty of plagues here that make eggplant a challenge but don't think I have encountered Verticillium in them. I used Actinovate in my plant dip this year but don't remember if I used it for the eggplants. I have considered trying eggplants in containers on the deck at home because there I don't seem to have flea beetles. Hope you get a few more fruit.
ReplyDelete