Disease in the garden can be some of the most frustrating things to deal with because

number one it's often hard to see them coming on and number two it's hard to know which one you have once you have

it finally number three it can be hard to get rid of right so how do we prevent them in the

first place there's a lot of different things that we can do,

and really most of them come down to being reasonable

about how you approach your planting in the garden.

For example, if you're growing something like a pepper

which we know is a quintessentially summer crop that likes eight plus hours of sun and

a good amount of heat, it's going to be a bad idea to try to plant those in the spring or fall

and put it in a semi shady area or an area with a decent amount of humidity.

It can just be a recipe for disasters. So there are a couple

sort of obvious things that we can do. Another thing that you can do is really the most

important and also the most boring and it would be

selecting disease resistant varieties variety selection just so so important

so if you've had an issue with downy mildew on your basil or powdery mildew on your zucchini or squash,

then you may want to swap for a variety that just doesn't have as much of a problem with that. It has a resistance

bred into it. You can call your local garden club or your county extension

office or even just do some research online for varieties that still look cool and still produce and

have the flavor that you want but are resistant to that particular disease

that you know you are struggling with. Now the next thing you can do is simply just to have a nice healthy plant. You know, the healthier our plants are, the more equipped they are to fight off diseases that might come up.

Another thing that we talk about a lot is to simply just

rotate your crops at least as far as the plant family is concerned. So if you're planting

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