Many modern hybrids are developed for disease resistance. Different diseases for different crops, of course. A lot of the seed companies which cater to commercial growers and have their own breeding programs often work with disease resistant varieties.

Two good ones are Stoke's Seeds in Buffalo, NY and Johnny's Selected Seeds in Albion, Maine.

Here is a link that might be useful: Johnny's Selected Seeds

Here's a link to Stoke's:

Here is a link that might be useful: Stoke's Seed Company

Thank you. I'll be checking out both very carefully. When do you generally order your seeds? I would want to order as early as possible to make sure I get what I want and to start them early in my GHs next spring.

I grow a lot of resistant vegetables, mostly those found through trial & error. Tomatoes are a whole field of study with a lot of experts here, so I'll focus on some of the others.

One of my biggest problems here is Verticillium wilt, which tends to kill most of my eggplant & okra, usually just about the time they blossom. Cold nights weaken the plants, and the fungus finishes them off. Two eggplants have proven to be resistant: "Diamond" and "Casper". The okra "Pentagreen" usually loses a few plants, but most of them produce until frost. SSE carries the two eggplants, Sand Hill Preservation carries the okra.

The sweet corn "Miracle" is resistant to smut, and several other diseases that are not endemic here (such as Stewart's wilt). It is widely available, I get mine through D. V. Burrell in Colorado. There is a good chart of disease resistance in hybrid sweet corns here.

Bean rust can be a problem in wet years. The pole varieties "Fortex" and "Garafal Oro" seem to be resistant. Johnny's carries "Fortex", Gourmet Seed International carries "Garafal Oro" (spelled with two R's).

For cucumbers, I grow "WI 5207". It is not sold by garden seed companies, but may still be available commercially. It is resistant to a host of cucumber diseases, including scab, cucumber mosaic virus, both downy & powdery mildew, anthracnose, both angular & target leaf spot, and Fusarium. Quite a package! It is also parthenocarpic, so will set fruit without bees - these will be seedless. The amazing thing is, this is an open-pollinated variety!

I have quite a few others, but they are heirlooms, so I will not list them here.

zeedman: Thanks for all that information. We're at the point of either trying resistant varieties or giving up gardening. To add insult to injury we rotate and the garden laid fallow (rested) for 2 years due to a bad accident I had. I couldn't grow a garden. Yet this year the problems are worse than ever. I lost all my squash, winter and summer, and have never seen anything like this years infestation of whitefly and spider mites in my entire life. What would make squash lose it's chlorophyll? Bacterial disease from the seed?

Also a strange thing happened to the 2 young crooknecks that I planted after the SVB invasion.... their leaves turned silvery white!!!!!!!! I don't see any insects at all on them. They're not in the garden. I planted them in an old flower bed that was never used for veggies.

Greenhouser, are there farms very close to you? The symptoms you describe sound like they could be chemical in nature; I wonder if a neighbor sprayed herbicide, and it blew onto your property. Squash would be more sensitive to that, due to their large leaf area. The other vegetables might not be killed, but just weakened... which would explain the insect infestations.

zeedman: Unfortunately yes! :( Our neighbor did spray a few times early this spring until I spoke to him,... asked him to please refrain until it was a windless day and to use a coarse spray. So as far as I know there's been no spraying since. He didn't realize drift could kill his own veggie garden as well. I pointed that out to him. His garden is only about 50' to 60' from mine. That doesn't account for the typical damage done by the whitefly and mites. The plants did well after his last spraying - that was back in May. Then the pests showed up! These 'silver' crooknecks were only planted a few weeks ago and are nowhere near the property line. :(