What's happening to our hostas?

11 years ago

These hostas are located on the north side of a detached garage. Leaves have some small holes and are increasingly yellowing/browning. Soil is moist as evidenced by some moss in the area. Plants seemed fine at the start of the season, this condition has appeared and steadily worsened over the last month. What is happening to them?

Moved into the home (Northern Illinois) about a year ago - do not have history on the plants themselves, fertilizers used, etc. Over the last year, I have used Scott's fertilizer treatment on the lawn, trying to take care not to broadcast treatments on to the hosta leaves. Same with an aggressive treatment of lawn violets using Ortho Weed-B-Gon Chickweed, Clover and Oxalis Killer. No fertilizer/treatment to the hostas over the last 12 months.

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Comments (3)

idiothe
11 years ago
You can check some of the pages like http://www.extension.iastate.edu/publications/sul14.pdf

and

http://www.americanhostasociety.org/Diseases.html

and look for some of the specialized signs... but my best guess is that some of the herbicides leached into the soil and the spreading hosta root system picked them up...

happened to me once...
ken_adrian Adrian MI cold Z5
11 years ago
severe drought...

the proof is in that green stuff in front ... which if watered .... might be called a lawn ...

hosta are extremely water dependent..

no water.. no hosta...

they will be back ... next year ....

and remove the grass for at least a foot in front of the hosta... so there wont be any application problems...

ken
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User
11 years ago
Hmmmm, well, can you take a look down near the crowns of those plants? If you find round small balls like Osmocote near the base of the petioles, perhaps a few going up the pets? And, if when you grab the leaves the whole petiole comes away from the crown with no effort at all, then I think you might have southern blight, also known as stem rot, crown rot, whatever. Look it up for help with removing the blight from your garden.