Welcome to The Yardstead
It seems that we have had a powdery mildew infection on our squash and zucchini plants every spring for the past 5 years. Since I wrote this article last year about measures to take to prevent powder mildew , we have been powdery mildew free! In reallity we were probably helped out this year by the weather, as well as our preventive measures. We followed most of the guidelines already, but I wanted to share a couple of things that seem to make the biggest difference from my experience. Here in Florida our sub-tropical (seems to be getting more tropical every year) climate makes a nice environment for many fungal infections. Hot temperatures and high humidity combined with nice green cucurbits like zucchini, squash, pumpkins, and gourds, make a very inviting environment for podwery mildew. The spores travel on the wind, and when they land in such an ideal spot, they try to set up camp. I believe that cucurbits have some natural resistance to fungal infections, but if the fungus gets even a slight advantage, it will win in the end.
Spring is Here! We are so excited here at theYardstead, to be preparing our Spring garden. The garden is tilled and has two fine patches of green already. One of the green patches is garlic and the other is onions, both of which were planted in the late fall for harvest this summer. We start most of our veggies from seed and sometimes supplement with plants from our local feed store. We have a box of seeds which has accumulated seed packets over the last several seasons, some of which we will plant this year. Kathleen, who is in charge of garden planning, will be ordering the rest from seed companies.
In the past we ordered a lot of seeds from Johnny's Seeds and Burpee, but this year we decided to go with all heirloom seeds. Heirloom seeds are.....
