Septoria: Why Rain is Not Always a Good Thing for Growing

We've had a lot of rain in Chicago this spring/early summer (is it summer?). A lot of rain. Almost every day. We're not going to have issues with drought. Ever. All the plants we threw in the plot alongside our garage (tomatoes and cukes) seemed to be doing really poorly. The leaves were developing holes and were yellowing. I was terrified of blight, but when I went online and looked, it clearly wasn't blight. But it was another form of mold called Septoria. It's a soil-borne mildew that's especially common in areas that have high levels of rainfall and cooler temperatures.

I hustled off an email to Ask a Master Gardener in Cook County. Looking for a Master Gardener in your area? In less than a few hours, I had my response:

Hi Ann,

Thanks for sending us your question.

You are certainly correct about how cold and nasty this Spring has been! Septoria leaf spot is caused by the fungus Septoria lycopersici. High relative humidity and temperatures between 68-77 F are favorable conditions for infection and development of this disease. Though we have not been blessed with much warmth, the humidity levels have definitely been high.

Listed below are measures that can help control the disease, from Iowa State University Extension with some comments from me:

1. Plant disease-free transplants. (Since it is early in the season, you may wish to buy new seedlings at a garden center and plant them in a different area of your garden. Ask at the garden center for varietals with resistance to septoria.)
2. Space plants appropriately for good aeration.
3. Stake plants and mulch to reduce contact with the soil. (Growing tomatoes in cages is relatively effective in this respect.)
4. Do not water plants from above. The spores on infected leaves are transferred by splashing water. (Also mulch tomato plants to cover soil around them and thus also reduce the possibility of spore movement.)
5. Remove any diseased leaves to slow down infection. (Recommendation: Place any diseased leaves in the garbage; do not compost.)
6. A fungicide spray program can be used to help control the disease. Check your garden center or available fungicide products.
7. Do not work with plants during wet conditions so as not to transfer spores to other plants.
8. Control susceptible weeds such as nightshade, jimson weed, and horse nettle to reduce the amount of fungus that may overwinter. (Note: the point here is that these weeds are also hosts to the septoria spores.)
9. Clean infected garden debris in the fall and till the ground. It would also be beneficial to retill again in the spring.
10. Rotate susceptible crops. Do not grow tomatoes, peppers, or eggplants (all members of the same plant family) in that area for three years.

For more information and photos of septoria leaf spot, follow this link to the University of Illinois Extension website: http://urbanext.illinois.edu/vegproblems/problems/d_leafspot.html

For more information on gardening in general, visit our website at: http//web.extension.uiuc.edu/cook/urbanhort.html

Happy Gardening,
The University of Illinois Extension Chicago Master Gardeners

If you ever have any gardening questions, seriously, ask a Master Gardener in your area. How? Find a Master Gardener in your area. Some of the information they provided in the email above was already known to me, but it's always good to get a second opinion. So, I pulled off all of the damaged leaves (the new growth was not yet infected) and placed tomato mulch around the plants so that they wouldn't get reinfected from the soil. The only things I'm ignoring are the recommendation to plant disease-resistant varieties--there aren't really any tomato varieties that are resistant to septoria--and to treat it with a fungicide. Blech! I got to eat this stuff, you know?

So now we come to the big conundrum: crop rotation. We've planted tomatoes in the same location for three summers now but it's biting us on the rear this time. So, next summer we've got to find someplace else to plant them. The only problem is...most of the plants we grow are in the same family or carry across certain diseases even if they're not. Namely, the root vegetables are out for us. It's cheaper to buy carrots in the store than to grow them, neither of us can eat onions, and I can only eat beets sparingly (but I am learning to like them). I can't imagine growing something I can't actually eat. What's the point?

What to do? Well, I'm looking at this website. Seems to me they get it more so than other websites that give you strict guidelines about what you can and can't plant. I think the area alongside the garage will have legumes and peas and some lettuce (and maybe peanuts--hey, it's something new). But I have no idea where we're going to fit 9 tomato plants in our grow beds, especially since we can't plant them in the grow bed over against the fence (because we're planting peppers there now). I think the bed by the garage might fit 6 or so. But we'll have to find another location for the other three.

Non-gardening stuff going on? I had a nasty cold for a week and a half that settled in my chest. I think I might have either strained a muscle coughing. I'm going to the doctor tomorrow to see if they can determine which it is. So, I haven't been doing a lot of gardening lately.

On the landscape gardening front, our clematis is blooming and is gorgeous!

A Break in the Action

Despite what you may think, life isn’t always about gardening. Sometimes, it’s also about Harry Potter, which is why I attended Leaky Con last week. (Well, that and I’m actually on staff at The Leaky Cauldron and my group hosted round table discussions.) It was incredible to meet people some, of whom I’ve only ever met online before.





It was a pick me up and I really needed one, because all of the cucumbers that I lovingly raised from seeds died. Plus, half of our tomato plants from Burpee also bought it and I’m not sure how the remaining ones will do. And here I thought I was so great seed starting all of my plants. Rick replaced the dead plants while I was away so I didn’t have to see the sad process. To add insult to injury, some animal is getting into the grow bed along the fence is digging up the beans that I planted. It’s even chewed off the sprouts. Needless to say, I’m irate. So, I went back to gardeners.com and got a few things that will keep critters out of the beds. Still…if I find the critter doing it, I’ll tie its tail in a knot.

Honesty is the Best Policy

Okay, so I was wrong to slam Burpee. We had a very cold night last night--close to a frost, but not quite. A friend of mine up in Evanston was tempering her plants by putting them on their screened porch at night and it might have killed off her cucumbers. Plus, I received notice that they just shipped the plants today, so I might have them by this weekend, which is when I was planning on planting the cukes I've seed started anyways.

Speaking of my friend, she's a first-time vege gardener and has been a little hesitant to start the whole process. In a bid to get her into the gardening to eat life, my husband and I went over to her house this weekend and helped prep a bed for vegetable gardening. It amazes me how little people tend to know about growing vegetables in this day and age. I helped pick out her plants at a local big box store and she kept asking "What are you looking for?" Well, basically, pick plants that aren't damaged, aren't drooping and don't have any noticeable cankers. No big deal.

I have to agree with Jorge Garcia (he plays Hurley on LOST and is also a gardener). I saw him on the Bonnie Hunt Show and he said "Things want to grow." It's true. Just stick it in the ground and water it and see what happens. How much should you water it? Vegetable plants need about an inch of water a week. Should you get a rain gauge? You can, but you don't have to. You can make your own or keep an eye on your local weather station. We tend to water the plants if we haven't gotten any rain for 3 days or so. It's relatively rare to go that many days without rain in Chicago during the spring and summer. (They're going to have to rename our city the Rainy City.)

The trick for newbs is to not stress about it and don't spend a ton of money your first summer out there.

Why Burpee pisses me off (but is only nominally wrong in the end)

So, you want to be an organic gardener? Well, good for you, but before you decide to “get back to the earth” let me just say this one thing: you’d never have been born without genetically modified organisms. Why? Because your ancestors would have died from hunger. A lot of things like to eat the same kind of food we do—insects, worms, birds, rodents, mold, bacteria—and without genetic engineering or selective breeding (yes, even for plants), we’d have lost bushels of crops and, consequently, millions of people to starvation. Not convinced? Need proof? Irish potato famine in the mid 1800s. ‘Nuff said.

Why are seeds important? Well, certain varieties of the vegetable or fruit you want to grow have been cultivated (which is just genetic engineering on a smaller scale) to be resistant to common pest problems. Popular vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes are especially susceptible and it’s best to find seeds that have resistance to multiple problems. Seeds matter and because they do, it’s important to buy seeds from a company that has a history in knowing how important cultivars are.

Enter W. Atlee Burpee & Co.

Washington Atlee Burpee was born in Philadelphia in the 1850s. Originally, it was thought he would become a physician like his father, but Burpee had other ideas. He was fascinated by the new science of genetics and spent much of his boyhood breeding poultry. In his adult years, he devoted himself almost exclusively to plant cultivation and using his insatiable drive to improve and innovate, created a Stringless Green Bean and Iceberg Lettuce. (I'm sure you've heard of that last one.) By the late 1890s, W. Atlee Burpee & Co. was the largest seed company in the nation.

I bought all my seeds from Burpee this year and opted to buy plants for my tomatoes and peppers, since I was a little lax in getting those seed started on time. Only, here’s the thing. Burpee states on its website that it will send the plants to you according to the right time for you to plant them in the ground. Not a bad idea at all, but their math is a bit off. When I called this past week wondering when I’d get my plants, I was informed that they would come in the end of May. If you look at earlier blog posts, you might notice that our last frost date averages out to the first week in May. I’m losing a whole month of growing time. The kind woman on the phone explained that I lived in USDA Zone 5. I corrected her, stating that I live in USDA Zone 5b and that according to NOAA, our last frost date is sometime in the first couple weeks of May. She had no idea what Zone 5b is. Even though the good people at W. Atlee Burpee & Co. claim to use the USDA zone hardiness map, they’ve never actually been to the USDA website.

Clearly, the USDA gets geograph in a way that Burpee doesn’t. Chicago is smack up against a large body of water. Though the jet stream travels from west to east, the effect of being close to Lake Michigan makes Chicago cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, hence the designation of Zone 5b. Of course, this all falls on deaf ears because the Burpee folks would rather reference their own website than the actual source of the information.

So, bottom line is I’m losing a few weeks of growing. But since most materials recommend that you not transplant tomatoes and cucumbers in the ground until a couple of weeks after the last frost date, I’ll be getting them no more than a week late. Still, next year I’m seed starting everything so I don’t have to deal with this again. And yes, I'll still buy the seeds from Burpee.

(Also, all you "organic" gardeners, pick up a bottle of Roundup next time you're at Home Depot because bindweed doesn't respond to anything else.)

What IS our annual Frost Date?

I mentioned in an earlier post that it’s important to know your annual spring frost date so you don’t plant too early. Most seedlings die off very quickly in a light frost situation and you don’t want all of your hard work to go to waste. But what do you do when your frost date differs depending on which source you rely upon?

For instance, I live in Chicago, Illinois and here are what three different websites have to say about our spring frost date:

The Old Farmers’ Almanac
April 20: chance of frost after this date = 50%
My grandmother might skin me alive for this, but these guys are off their rockers. I’m sure they have a plethora of data, but I think it’s the wrong data. They listed South Bend, Indiana’s frost date as April 26? How in the world did Chicago, a city with a much harsher climate than South Bend get a frost date almost an entire week earlier? And we’re only three days behind Indianapolis? I would hazard a guess that they’re relying a bit too much on their percentage of chance of frost after that date. But do you really want to chance killing off your plants? It’s not like they’re cheap to replace.

Victory Seed Company
April 25
They state on their website that this data is from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). If anyone would have the data—the CORRECT data—I think the Feds would. However, if you read along, you notice that the data is from 1988. Not that climate change would be that significant 20 years ago, but shouldn’t they maybe update their page? And this is a spit in the eye of global warming (which I do wholeheartedly believe in) since April 25 is still a mite early to be planting. How in the world did Chicago end up with a date of 4/25 when East St. Louis (all the way down at the southernmost part of the state) ended up with a spring frost date of 5/1? Sheesh! Does everyone in East St. Louis leave their refrigerators open?

NOAA
Okay, here’s where we get the real truth, with all of the probability numbers to back it up. I live right in between O’Hare and Midway airport where the government captures the weather information, so I’ll list both locations:

>50% probability that temps will drop to 32° F
O’Hare: April 25
Midway: April 20
>10% probability that temps will drop to 32° F
O’Hare: May 10
Midway: May 6

Since I’m in the middle, I’d say the dates are April 23 and May 8. I like being safe, so I’m not going to plant until May 8.

The Cucumbers

We had to seed-start the cucumbers and never having done it before (I watched my mom seed start a couple of times when I was young but never got involved in it myself) I decided to get a little help. I used the APS system from Gardener’s Supply. A word about that website: it's freakin' awesome whether you're a newbie, an intermediate gardener or whether you've grown anything under the sun for years. They have great tools to make gardening easy. They know that today people aren't living on a farm where they can keep an eye on their garden all day long--we're working at desks and gardening is something that we do as a past-time. I imagine my grandma (and other people who grew up on a farm) might scoff at some of the things I've gotten on the website, like the seed starting kit or the aqua cones, but these things just make it a little easier. I'm not rich, but I'm not hurting for money (yet) so paying a little money to get something that has everything I need to seed start is worth it to me. Plus, the site includes customer reviews, so you can check and see if something really is worth it. (I took a bit of a gamble on the aqua cones, but I need something that will address watering on the back half of the garden without running a drip hose all the way across the backyard. And for $10--the price of two Starbucks lattes--if it fails, I'm not going to freak out about it.)

APS system packaged up.

Man did those cucumbers ever germinate quickly! We put them on top of a radiator since they're supposed to be at around 80 degrees to start the whole germination process. A couple of days later, I pulled off the cover to let the little plants escape! Out of the 24 seeds that we started for the cucumbers, only one never did germinate. The rest all came up like gangbusters.

Cucumbers coming up!

Fast forward about a week and all of a sudden, the vine cucumbers are all over the freakin' place!

Cucumbers Gone Wild

So I decide that they need to be repotted, but I don't have cells to pot them in, or peat pots, like we did at Twixwood. Plus, I need a material that will retain water because they're still just seedlings and need to grow their root systems more. So what did I do? Styrofoam cups. I poked holes in the bottom for drainage.

Cups ready for plants

“Repotted” Vine Cucumbers

We’ll plant them in the ground in about a week.

We spent yesterday working compost and peat moss into our plot against the garage where a good portion of the soil is clay. We went with 1/2 a compressed bushel of peat moss and 160 lbs of compost and I'd say it wasn't nearly enough. We're going to have to take out a huge portion of the dirt next spring and work even more compost and peat moss into the soil. But here's what it looks like now.

Treated Soil

Vegetable Gardening-Let the Insanity Begin!

Square Foot Gardening takes a lot of muscle work in the beginning. No matter what the book tells you, do NOT try and mix more than one bed at time on your tarp. My husband and I both work out and we barely could lift the tarp for one 3’x3’ bed. Here are a couple of pictures I took of the process.

Empty bed ready for dirt mixture

Compost on the tarp

Finished bed with planted broccoli!

Landscaping to May 2009

Our backyard in bloom

So far this year, this is what's happened to our landscaping: We pulled out the Russian Sage. Roots rotted on that one, too. It's too bad because I loved the look of the plant and the smell was divine. I'm considering replanting it next year, but I want a chance to try and control the decorative grass in that area, first and figure out a way to make the soil drain better. We divided up the Lavender in the middle island and planted it so everything was nice and symetrical. We separated the Seedum because it was so big last summer the stalks fell over. We got the two trees from the yard that belongs to our neighbor to the south (Pam) cut down so they no longer hang over our fence, shading our vegetable garden. It's drastically reduced the number of squirrels we've seen in our yard since their means of escape from our "vicious" dog Ruthie is now limited.

The Current Landscape

Who knows what will happen this year? Which plants will thrive, which will fail? So, I guess I at least need to set a baseline for where I'm at and here it is. This is based on the original plan that the prior owner had done by Gethsemane Nursery. Note the two grow beds in the locations where the dead Kerria bushes were. And I didn't note this in the diagram, but the coneflowers have completely taken over the island. I don't mind because my niece, Charlotte likes picking them when she comes over and the more there are, the more fun she can have!


Square Foot Gardening and the Dust Bowl
A word about gardening, okay, farming and my other love, reading. In less than a week I barreled through The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, describing the wheat boom and severe drought in the Great Plains that resulted in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The descriptions of people trying to live through harrowing dust storms were freakish. They plugged up cracks under doors and around windows. They hung wet sheets over their windows and the black dust still found a way into their house, coating pots and pans, the floor, themselves. People died from something called dust pneumonia--basically because they inhaled too much of the airborne topsoil. Farm animals were blinded in dust storms. Cows died from having too much dust in their stomachs. Nothing grew in the Great Plains for years. Starving horses would chew on fence posts, trying to get some nourishment. And how did this happen? Because people plowed up the prairie grass to plant wheat and make a quick buck. Sustainable gardening or farming could have prevented the Dust Bowl and it's something I'm embracing this summer by trying out Square Foot Gardening.

Square Foot Gardening is a method developed by Mel Bartholomew during the environment-embracing 70s. It's supposed to give you a greater yield using few resources. There are some initial set-up costs. I bought grow beds instead of assembling them myself (it's just easier) and bought compost instead of using my own (again, easier and actually cheaper since I'd have to get a compost bin to make my own compost) and I had to order the vermiculite from a nursery supply company in Michigan. Still, the beds are down and will last several summers as will the vermiculite and I hope to be eating more vegetables than I would have thought possible to grow in that space.

Here's what we're going to try and grow in the bed against the garage:


Here's what we're going to try and grow in the bed against the fence on the north side:


I actually bought the broccoli plants today and will be planting them in the bed tomorrow. (You literally need to seed start broc in mid-February or early March if you want to use your own and I just didn't think that far ahead.)

Tales of Summers Past: Catching up to the Present

What have we done since we got here? Well, here's a quick rundown...

Summer 2007: Landscaping
The Butterfly Bush was dead when we got here. That was the first thing we took out. Rather, Rick watched me take out. We also cleared the spot against the garage. The only thing that was still trying to hang on was a scraggly Rhododendron and some Fountain Grass. I realized that those climbing vines with the white and pink flowers that were just everywhere in the backyard were not part of the landscaping. They're called bindweed and they are nearly impossible to kill. I used Roundup (glyphosphate) on them and it helped a little, but since they're so interwoven into the rest of the landscaping, it wasn't easy. Seems like the only thing that will help control them is starving them from sunlight. (Their roots are too deep and interconnected to pull up entirely.) So, I started pulling. And pulling and pulling. It was the summer of pulling weeds. Every day after work while Ruthie was relaxing in the backyard, I'd spend half an hour pulling the damn things from every surface I could find. I began to hate the whole idea of gardening.

Summer 2007: Vegetables
It was our first time planting tomatoes and cucumbers on the back section of our yard against the garage. I found out that squirrels really dig Roma tomatoes. We got maybe two Roma tomatoes off 4 plants that summer. Thankfully, the grape tomatoes they left untouched and they were delicious! The big surprise was that our cucumbers tasted incredible. A friend at worked remarked that they tasted like she imagines cucumbers in heaven will taste.

Summer 2008: Landscaping
We realized that nothing along the backside of the house is ever going to grow because it just doesn't get enough sun--except for crabgrass and weeds. Hello, Roundup! We got most of the backyard mulched to help with the weed pulling. We realized that the vinca in the front would never grow evenly because the north side of the lot gets more sun than the south side where it's shaded by our neighbor's giant tree. That's also why the arbor vitae on the north side of the lot is twice as tall as the one on the south side. The Kerria bushes died because their roots rotted out. I miss those pale yellow flowers in the spring, but I'm not bothering to plant that bush again. We have a lot of clay in our soil, so drainage is a real problem. I realize that maybe we should dig up large sections of our landscaping and mix in compost or topsoil or even some kind of sand mixture to combat the clay, but that’s a lot of work and a lot money just to have pretty plants in your backyard.

Summer 2008: Vegetables
The cucumbers were good, but not as tasty as they seemed the summer before. We planted 3 grape tomato plants, one Big Boy plant and 6 (yes, 6) Roma tomato plants. We used tomato cages purchased from Gardeners Supply Company. A word about that website: it's freakin' awesome whether you're a newbie, an intermediate gardener or whether you've grown anything under the sun for years. They have great tools to make gardening easy. They know that today people aren't living on a farm where they can keep an eye on their garden all day long--we're working at desks and gardening is something that we do as a pasttime. I imagine my grandma (and other people who grew up on a farm) might scoff at some of the things I've gotten on the website, like the seed starting kit or the aqua cones, but these things just make it a little easier. I'm not rich, but I'm not hurting for money (yet) so paying a little money to get something that has everything I need to seed start is worth it to me. Plus, the site includes customer reviews, so you can check and see if something really is worth it. We put up a small half-fence, trying to deter the squirrels and also got a hot pepper spray that we squirted on the plants after as a deterrent. The spray didn’t change the flavor of the veggies and the squirrels stayed away for the most part. Our mistake was that we had a vacation right during the hottest week in the summer. Our Romas took it hard and every single one came out mealy instead of moist. We also planted green beans and red peppers in containers on a whim. We only got 3 red peppers out of the two plants and only a couple of helpings of beans, but I was never all that diligent with watering.

Opening Day

This blog is for me and only me to keep track of my gardening adventures and travails so that, hopefully, I can learn from my mistakes from year to year. Maybe other people will want to pop in and have a good laugh at my gardening mishaps. Hey, who am I to deny someone a chuckle at my own expense? But maybe I should then explain the name of the blog. My husband's nickname for me is Fussy Britches, based in part on the line from Shawshank Redemption where the warden questions the poster of Raquel Welch in Andy DuFresne's empty cell ("What say you, fussy britches? Feel like talkin'?") and partially because when I don't have something to do, I tend to get a little fussy. Thankfully, gardening takes care of the idea of never having something to do because there's ALWAYS something to do with the garden--even in the dead of winter.

My gardening background
I'm two generations off the farm (this particular farm was located in Granite Falls, Minnesota). My mom always kept some kind of vegetable garden while I was growing up in Michigan, even if it was just tomatoes. (Her mom left the farm and moved to the city when she got married, but lived on 1/4 acre lot and kept the most ridiculously large vegetable/fruit garden that you've ever seen). My mom grew things to eat--pragmatic gardening only.

When I was 14, I went to work. Michigan is state that depends on agriculture and their child labor laws are a little more relaxed than most states' when it comes to that industry. In Michigan, you can work 40 hours a week during the summer starting at age 14. So, I worked fulltime at a plant nursery during the summer. The nursey was primarily a perennial groundcover nursery and didn't get into your fancier, fussier plants like roses (though they did have some miniature ones). The work was grueling. You were usually standing all day, doing the same thing over and over again, sometimes for weeks at a time. When you fell asleep, you'd dream that you were still doing it. If you weren't standing in puddles from soaked cuttings with sticking powder constantly tickling your nose, you were covered in dirt from potting, or had an aching back from working in the fields. I hated that job and I hated my parents for making me work there. I never had any interest in plants or growing anything of any kind. You would have thought I'd have left as soon as I turned 16 (where you can work full-time in the summer in other industries), but I stayed there. The work was backbreaking, but all my friends worked in the same place.

Fastforward 10 years. I'm married and I desperately want a house for no other reason than I want to plant something. I've been living in apartments since college and just want to grow tomatoes that actually have flavor. Standard lots in Chicago are 25'x125' (no, that's not a typo) so we specifically looked in neighborhoods where lots were slightly larger. That meant neighborhoods either on the South Side (I'm not living anywhere that I have to dodge bullets) or on the very fringes of the city of Chicago. We chose the latter.

This is our third year in our house on Nagle that has a ridiculous amount of landscaping in the front and back and we're finally doing something with it this year. Clearly, the former owner thought it was okay to get the landscaping done and forget it, but that's just silly. If you want nice plants, you're going to have to work for them.

Some facts about my area
I'm in USDA zone 5b. Find your zone and what it means!
Our frost/freeze date is around May 12. Find your frost/freeze date! But be leary of these dates! If you've lived in a location for a couple of years, you probably have a better gauge of what date you can expect the temps to dip below freezing at night than some random website. We have landscaping and vegetable gardens and I vastly prefer vegetable gardens to ornamental gardening.