Hello all,
My favorite mailing list friends...
My problem at hand: I pulled up my tomato plants this morning (I've
never grown them before) and the roots were very strange looking. They
were fleshy and gnarled, almost bulbous. Is this correct for the tomato
or am I suffering from nematodes? My sunset books pictures leads me to
the conclusion that it is the latter. To be sure, I dug up some cosmos
and daffodils in the same bed. They were perfectly fine...Except for
meal worms...(I think) everything in that bed has white squiggles on
their leaves, are those leaf
borers, and are all three related? What should I do?
The ony reason I stopped growing Marigolds was that they seemed to get
more of those white squiggles "in" the leaves worse than anything
else....what are they? They are on my squash plants too...but not the
oxalis or jasmine or gardenia or 4 o'clocks...Just marigolds, yellow
cosmos, tomato, asters, and chrysanthemums (?) ...pardon my spelling
By the way what are tomato roots supposed to look like?
The white larvae you saw on your daffodils are unrelated to nematodes.
Nematodes are a difficult problem to solve, especially in the short term.
An increase in soil organic matter often helps. You can also grow a cover
crop of marigolds and plow it down (or mulch over it) and follow with a
nematode-sensitive crop. Some crops are fairly resistant, some are very
sensitive. You can tell by looking at your plants.
There have some nematode-resistant varieties of some crops released, but I've
not checked it out. Nematodes are an intractable problem in sandy soils in
hot climates. Often, otherwise adapted crops, such as figs, never produce
because of nematodes.
If you live near the seashore, try seaweed after a storm as mulch. The slime
the seaweed produces as it decomposed should increase soil moilsture and the
high level of potassium ions should have a nematicidal effect.
For Mother Earth, Yankee Permaculture Publications (since 1982), Elfin
Permaculture workshops, Permaculture Design Courses, consulting and
permaculture designs (since 1981), and The Forest Ecosystem Rescue Netework
POB 2052, Ocala FL 34478 USA
I've had pretty good luck with crab meal (ground crab shell) as a soil
amendment (theory is that soil organisms inimical to nematodes are
stimulated by the crab or shrimp wastes) but probably the best approach is
to have very high organic matter and fertility, so that the plants can
outgrow the damage. Also, never plant nematode-vulnerable crops twice in
the same spot; rotate the ground to resistant species.
Finally, one very promising approach is solarization, if you can afford to
leave a portion of your garden fallow during the summer months.
Ray
