Very little in the world of horticulture is black and white. Many disease organisms are ubiquitous. Add to that the absolute fact that some plants are particularly susceptible to certain of those diseases, then you have a battle on your hands, no matter how healthy the soil is.

Fostering a healthy, balanced soil and using good horticultural practices will go a long way in helping plants stay healthy, make no mistake! Add smart plant selection into all of that and you just might have a (nearly) pest free garden! Many of us work towards that all of the time, year in and year out.

The three diseases you mention are important to any discussion of intelligent plant selection as well as cultural methods. For example, I wouldn't consider planting a fusarium susceptible plant into a soil that may not drain perfectly after heavy rainfalls, or where diseased plants have lived earlier.

SO! The ideal situation is to have a healthy soil system, know how to grow plants that aren't kept on a leash of fertilizers, frequent watering and pesticides, and avoid plants that are known disease or insect magnets.

If you work at making your soil into a good healthy soil that will grow strong and healthy plants those plants will be better able to ward off disease pathogens and insect pests will find the plants less attractive. Having plants that are constantly diseased or under attack by insects is not normal although many people that are "conventional" gardeners will tell you that.
A soil that does not drain is not a healthy soil, but a good, healthy soil will drain properly. As Rhizo states some plants, especially many hybrids, are simply more suscetible to some plant diseases, but just like you will get diseases if you do not eat a balanceds diet so will your plants.

Actually, many hybrids have been bred FOR disease resistance. It's certainly one of the most important characteristics selected for in trial gardens. We can all purchase disease resistant annuals, perennials, woody shrubs, trees, fruits and veggies.

Sometimes, however, the disease resistant genes come to us at the sacrifice of flavor, color, aroma, or other characteristics. Darn it all.

Thanks you guys! I've been trying to figure out fungi, bacteria, and virus - I think I have that down. Soil Borne diseases are a high concern for me esp with organics and being a gardener where soil fumigation is not practical. I've also read about organisms that can be introduced into compost that may attack various diseases that might be present in the compost bin. Read about steaming soil, solarization but those can kill the good guys leaving the soil open for rapid reproduction of the thing we were actually trying to kill. Recently, asked others about sterilizing tools and got a response about healthy soil means little to no disease, thought I would check with the wonderful people at gardenweb. I have heard this over and over and I am not sure of the validity. Nice idea though. There are just so many factors as to how disease can enter your gardening system.

Thank you again for responding.
Donna

Healthy well draining soil is the foundation for healthy plants. Even good soil that sits under-water a bit or even is too soggy will tend to have some kind of fungal maladay. I had about 15 inches of rain here in a 30 day period and the few areas that were lower showed some hurt or at least some temporary yellowing.

For several years I have been having Japanese Beetle infestations. In '03 I bagged an estimatied 270,000 of them besides killing many more. Finally this year I have seen about 20 beetles. Is anyone else experiencing this kind of change.

I don't recall seeing comments saying that sterilizing tools is NEVER needed. Seldom, maybe.
The link below covers when/where/what of tool sterilizing.The Author Linda Chalker-Scott, Ph.D., Extension Horticulturist and Associate Professor,
Puyallup Research and Extension Center, Washington State University has a personal favorite of Lysol, not bleach.
http://www.puyallup.wsu.edu/~Linda%2...ng%20tools.pdf
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Re: the 'healthy soil, healthy plants' argument ... Most of us do the best we can to maximize soil-web health, but even with the best care/methods 'stuff' happens.

Here is a link that might be useful: Sterilizing tools

"...but just like you will get diseases if you do not eat a balanceds diet...

What a load of hooey.

While I'm inclined to believe healthy plants and animals are more able to withstand disease/attack, I'm with borderbarb, sometimes "'stuff' happens".

Lloyd

Are you familiar with the concept of the disease triangle? In keeping with all the comments, I think healthy soil is one important way to help with reducing plant disease.

Here is a link that might be useful: Disease Triangle

Neither of those two links are working.

No matter how healthy we are we will still sometimes catch a cold. It's the same with plants but soil diseases are not always fatal to plants. I've seen some plants in my garden show signs of wilt or other soil borne diseases and then throw them off. Plants have immune systems just as we do. All we can do is try to have healthy plants in healthy soil and hope for the best.

This is were too many people here fail to grasp what is written, a good, healthy soil will help REDUCE the incidence of plant disease and insect problems and that does not mean it will eliminate them. Since plants would rather grow up free of diseases and pests it you the gardener provide them with sufficient opportunity they will do that.
I have and still correspond with far too many people throughout the world that haveby working on making the soil they have into a good, healthy soil seen many problems with plant diseases and insect pest diminished to the point those are not of much concern. There are some here that have in the past stated that they tried organic gardening for a year and it did not work so they went back to the "conventional" ways because they did not understand that it can take 3 to 5 years to take a sick soil and make it well.

Will "healthy soil" help protect the plants? Well, Duh! Of course it will. However, if you plant the same stuff in the same place year after year as many gardeners have to do because they only have a small area to garden, problems will accumulate in the soil. If it has been mentioned here somewhere I missed it but using a good layer of mulch can be a layer of protection for the gardener. Rain splashes up the soil bourne nasties to the plants and things go bad quickly.

Nightshade crops in particular benefit from mulch for this reason bigtime. I use containers for most of mine but have done experiments in the garden and found that without the mulch it is hopeless but with mulch I often get good yields. The container plants are put in random areas around the yard so this "splash-up" thing is not a problem.

Many of the perennials in my garden have been in the same plantingbned for some 30 years now and they still do not show any sign of plant disease. On rare occassion I might see an insect pest, but most often before I need to do something one or another of the predators takes care of that wee bugger for me. The bed where tomatoes grow is the bed that tomatoes have been growing in for many years no (it is handy to the kitchen) and I have no plant disease prolems with them because the soil has compost added every year and has the soil tested periodically and is in balance for nutrients and has a good pH, drains quite well but holds moisture much better then it did before the addition of organic matter, has a lot of active soil life, earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, pill bugs, etc.
Having plants that get diseases or are pestered by insect pests is not normal and is a sign opf a problem, most often soil related. Soil is splashed onto plants because the soil is not covered with a mulch as it should be.
Soil should never be left bare an exposed to the ravages of the sun, wind, and rain. Ma Nature does not like that and plants "weeds" in that bare and exposed soil to try to protect it.

Well, if I had your unsurpassed volumes of knowlege on everything related to mulches, composting, and soil, I probably wouldn't even have root knot nematodess in my SW Florida soil.

Now if I can just get my okra "trees" to bloom and produce.

well ... they define healthy soil as soil where healthy plants are growing, so it's a circular definition.

I guess if kimmsr had a bad year his soil would suddenly be taken ill?

As I read through kimmsr's comments, a couple of things came to mind ..FIRST....His justifieable pride in the soil that he has nurtured/developed through 30 years of gardening. Ditto for me, whose nasty clay/DG soil has morphed [in only 42 years] into the greatest soil IN THE WORLD. SECOND....he cites the health of perenlial plants that have been in place for 30 years wi/o substantial pest/disease problems. I'm thinking that the soil-web-root symbiosis works best when it is never disturbed ... more closely replicates Nature's cycle/system. And conversely, to note that the problems we encounter in our vegetable gardening may be due to the artificial nature of that kind of gardening. His success with tomatoes grown in same ground for many years with no disease/pest problems, may indeed be due to disturbing the soil as little as possible, mulching/feeding the soil, years of experience, and I think he might also agree, a certain measure of luck. If there is anything I've learned in many years of gardening [much of it with a pickaxe, doing battle with compacted soil of the worst kind left by a developer][grrr]..it is that a good dose of humilty/fatalism/humor is essential to my gardening experience.

I have gardened in many different soils in many different areas of the USA and I correspond with organic gardeners all over the world and have seen the same thing no matter where I have been and am told the same thing by these organic gardeners I correspond with, plants growing in a good, healthy soil are less susceptible to disease and pest problems then plants growing in not good and healthy soils. Plant diseases and insect pests are not a normal part of gardeneing except for those that use what is termed today "conventional" gardening methods, synthetic fertilizers, soils devoid of organic matter, and spraying broad spectrum poisons in an effort to keep the garden insect free.
If you have a plant that is an insect pest magnet there is a problem with that plant and you need to look at why. If you have a p;lant that has a plant disease you need to look at why. Some plants are more susceptible to those problems, maybe because they are growing in the wrong place, the wrong soil, too much sun, a nutrient imbalance, the wrong soil pH, etc.
The only way to know if there is a nutrient imbalance in your soil the only way to know that is with a soil test since yo cannot look at soil and see that the Phosphorus and Potash are not in balance, by the time these things show up in plants there is a serious problem, and nutrient deficiencies are not that easy to see in plants either since many look very similar.

I worked for 15 years on my clay soil, refused to buy truckloads of topsoil stripped from somewhere else, so I made raised beds a mm at a time by adding compost, post-flood sandbags, occasional bags of store-bought compost (and even topsoil, cheated!), more compost, silt from a boat ramp after a flood, compost, mulches, reduced digging to encourage natural fluff, more compost, you get the picture. The beds are now 3-6" above the surrounding ground.

I have every disease and pest under the sun in my garden. I rotate crops, mulch the tomatoes, they get *decimated* by blight anyway. Spray with organics, no effect, alternate with synthetic pesticides, MAYBE get a decent crop. Basil and rhubarb can abruptly wilt and die. Cabbage worms, triple threat for any squash crops (squash bugs, cuke beetles AND vine borers), stunted pepper plants. Probably most of the problems came in with city yard waste mulch used only in the paths, but I don't know. Even when things are going well, the squirrels show up and eat most of the peach crop while I'm at work or DIG UP the root balls of newly planted seedlings.

But, the soil is gorgeous, so everything must be fine. :-]

Thanks for the chuckle Tox! Life is tuff for those of us that don't know absolutely everything. My soil is some of the best that will be found in many miles from my home and I like you fight the good fight to harvest a crop.

"If you have a plant that is an insect pest magnet there is a problem with that plant and you need to look at why"

There is no "problem" with eggplants that attract white flies, because that's what they do, irrespective of soil health. In fact, I plant them specifically to lure these pests away from other (to me more desirable) plants such as tomatoes.

Over the years I've added tons of health-building compost to my beds and I consider my soil and local ecosystem to be pretty good. So my flourishing eggplants are doubly attractive to white flies, but also to the devourers of white fly larvae.

Tox, what is your soils pH?
What is the level of Phosphorus?
What is the level of Potash?
Soils in bogs, fens, swamps looks pretty good, but it is not good and healthy. What a soil looks like, smells like, handles like is only a small part of knowing your soil. You also need to know the nutrient balance, or lack of, to know whether you have a good healthy soil.
If the plants in your soil have problmes with plant diseases and insect pests there is a problem with the soil. It is not normal for any plant to have diseases or pests, unless you are a conventional gardener and have a soil loaded with synthetic "fertilizers" which do not a good, healthy soil make.

I haven't had it tested for awhile, but a couple of years into it (probably at least 10 yrs ago now) I had the garden and lawn soil tested. Everything came out very high in the garden as a result of the compost I was adding, but the lawn soil was deficient in P. This explained why the dwarf fruit trees were not blooming. I used bone meal and when I (occasionally - like every 2 years) fertilize the lawn I use 12-12-12 instead of 29-3-3 to boost up the P. It worked and now we get fruit. It was a former farm field so it was pretty worn out.

The garden was pH 7 - 7.5 as I recall, and I discontinued putting ash into the compost because I was worried about it getting too high.

I don't use much fertilizer on the garden but this year the peppers were so stunted that I put soluble 10-30-20 on them a couple weeks in a row and sprinkled some high N granular around them. They greened up nicely, grew very well for the last month or so and now are producing peppers despite the brutal heat. So I think the nearby tree roots are just robbing more nitrogen than I can put in there with my limited compost.

I have friends who do much less tinkering and soil building and have much better gardens with less disease. You think I should have it tested again?

"You think I should have it tested again?" If you have friends that have better gardens with less tinkering and have fewer problems with plant diseases that goes without saying.
What I have noticed with my soil over the years of adding organic matter is that the soil pH has come up (from 5.7 to 7.2) the level of both Phosphorus and Potash has gone from low to mediuim high and the Calcium and Magnesium levels are in balance. The3 only way anyone can know that is with a good, reliable soil test.

How much do these soil tests cost? Not everyone is related to someone named Rockefeller.

In the $10-$20 range. Contact your county Ag Extension office to find out how to get one done. They will either take your sample themselves or direct you to the lab they use - here it's my local state University soils lab.

"How much do these soil tests cost? Not everyone is related to someone named Rockefeller."

It's $6 here in Mississippi, and $7 in FL where you live.

Here is a link that might be useful: Soil test fee schedule, Florida

Michigan State University charges $15.00 per sample, UMASS charges $13.00 per sample. Some states do not test soils but the CES office in those states can dirtect you to a lab that can test, or you can contact UMASS because they will do tests for anyone, anywhere.