First, why are you using soap at all? Soap is useless as a pest control means unless it makes direct contact with soft bodied insects like aphids. Many of the beetles and such that bother plants wouldn't even mind being directly sprayed. Once it dries on the plant it won't kill anything. It's also pointless to use while it's raining.

Depending on what you are using for 'soap' you may be damaging your plants with it, particularly with repeated use. Not everything we consider soap really is soap and some of the products on the market contain other stuff that is toxic/damaging to plant tissue.

And yes, plants growing in mud is a problem. It means the soil isn't draining which makes for low oxygen conditions in the soil which leads to roots dying and plants not growing. Not a lot you can do about the rains though, just wait it out.

If you find that your soil is staying muddy for more than a day once the rains have stopped then you have a drainage issue that needs to be addressed. I am not saying the soil needs to be dry in a day to the point it needs to be watered, but if it's actually mud, that's a drainage problem.

Your best bet in that case is raised beds or raised rows.

Mud...

Raise your beds

Define "treated them with soap". That can mean so many things. What kind of soap? Dilution used? How often? For what pests? Is your garden mulched? Was your soil amended to improve it at all? With what? Without specifics all we can do is lay it all off on rainy weather and poorly draining soil.

As already said soapy water spray (1 T of real soap to a gallon of water) only works for certain pests and can harm the plants if used incorrectly and the easiest way to fix poorly draining soil is to make raised beds filled with a good mix.

Need more details please.

Dave

Too much rain can harm plants, but usually this time of year it doesn't come with that biting cold that summer plants really hate.

Sounds like your plants don't like your soil much...maybe for a quickie fix, try adding compost around them, then on top of the compost, add a dry mulch like shredded newspaper or straw.

That will at least feed your plants a bit and keep them from getting splashed with mud.

Sometimes, for various reasons(bad soil, bad weather, an iffy start due to bugs)plants that don't have a good childhood don't do well as they grow. They need to be babied during the seedling stage for sure...maybe where you bought them or grew them wasn't right.

Hope they recover.

Ok so it is pretty clear to me that the soap treatment did it. Now that I have done some more reading, I have learned that squash and cauliflower in specific are very sensitive to soap treatment...which was ill-advised anyway. Lesson learned.

I have not mulched yet, no. I plan to do so today or tomorrow.

More importantly, though, I would like to raise my beds but cant do that immediately. I will probably work on that for next year.

At least I know what I did wrong, though.

Thanks for all the help and advice.

I'd add that if they're muddy enough that a singificant portion of the leaves are not getting sunlight, you might wash the leaves and put mulch under them to prevent future mud. I've had the same thing happen, and I think plants don't like being significantly muddy. If it's a few splatters, probably nothing to worry about.

Gardening seems easy, but it's not...it's a trial and error of what works, what doesn't. You will have good seasons and then not so good, sometimes as a result of your doing, sometimes it's just mother nature who messes things up.

Re: mud, You could consider putting something like newspaper down around the plants as well and then top that off with mulch...If you have this much moisture, the newspaper or cardboard, could help absorb it, plus it makes a great weed barrier and eventually breaks down adding OM to the soil.

Also daily leaf lifting and bug squishing is probably the best thing you can do. It's tedious and gross (stink bugs are nasty critters, just discovered that they fly, I NEVER saw them fly before, just drop off to the ground when confronted.) So far I have only lost one squash to SVB, and I'm finding eggs every once in a while that get squished.

Oh ya and disposable gloves are a god send for this task.