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. 

 Powdery mildew is a fungal disease which affects many types of plants.  Cucurbits like zucchini, squash, pumpkins, melons and gourds are all succeptable to powdery mildew.  It usually appears on leaves as small round white powdery spots which quickly spread and cover the entire leaf.  In our garden here at the yardstead we've lost many zucchini, squash and pumpkin plants to powdery mildew.  This year powdery mildew killed all of our zucchini and most of our paty pan sqash and yellow squash.  
It is usually easy to identify powdery mildew by its appearance on the top of the leaves.  It usually looks like white powder on the leaves.  Infected leaves usually turn yellow and wilt after just a few days.  Powdery mildew usually appears in our garden on one or two plants then quickly spreads to all the other zucchini and squash plants.   The infected plants usually don't die completely and frequently send out new leaves and flowers.  We have been able to recover from powdery mildew in the garden a few times, when we caught it early and sprayed all the plants with neem oil.
On a few other occasions I applied the funigicide ...........