Turn over a bean leaf in July and you may find a row of white pinheads hovering beneath it. They are too orderly for dust and too widely spaced for mold. Each one hangs at the end of a filament so fine that the egg seems to be floating a fraction of an inch away from the leaf. The obvious…
On a June morning, a garden can seem to have developed a strange habit. White froth appears around a lavender stem, in the fold of a strawberry leaf, or where a blade of grass meets its sheath. It looks freshly blown. Rain does not wash it into streaks, and no snail trail explains how it arrived halfway up a plant.…
Read more about The white foam on garden stems is a spittlebug nursery
Powdery mildew often arrives looking almost harmless. A squash leaf that was green yesterday appears dusted with flour. A phlox stem has a pale bloom on its upper leaves. The cucumber patch still looks productive, the zinnias are still bright, and yet the garden has acquired a strange white weather of its own. The first instinct is usually to blame…
By June, a spinach leaf can begin to look as if something has been writing inside it. The surface is still mostly green, still cool from morning watering, but pale lines wander through the tissue in loose loops and narrow bends. They are too clean to be slug damage, too internal to be chewing, and too deliberate-looking to feel random.…
