Karyn, I had the same problem with my arbors when I went hog-wild with seeds from Emma & other traders in 2007 - that was the most glorious year of growing morning glories ever.

I need to find out how to post pics here so I can show you how pretty one of them was before rust arrived.

Anyhoo, I won't grow vines of I. nil cultivars so close to each other again, either. I followed a technique suggested by Gourd to maintain ID on my vines, which involved using colored straws. You slit the straw long-ways, and then cut it up into small pieces, so that each piece can be wrapped around a vine. I must have crept my way through miles of vines from leaf node to leaf node so I could color-code vines well enough to distinguish them from their neighbors, while being true to the label at the base of each one. Per Emma's advice, I had made a map earlier of where each vine was located, so I didn't always have to refer to the label at the base of each vine - that helped a lot.

don't know if that's helpful, or not - hope so

karen

Karyn,
Rust on the hoop house frame? I was going to copy your idea and try that next year. I wonder if spray painting the frame with Rustoleum would retard rust development enough to be beneficial.

I have grown them over a hoop house in use as a shade house before by tying twine to an anchor on each side of the house in succession down the length of the structure. I did a 12'x36' house that was soon covered in vines. It worked very well and looked good until late in the season when the vines became too dense and the house was too shaded. I had to pull some vines off and it looked kind of messy.
I may try that again next year with fewer plants.

karen, I would love to see your photos.

Karen you have to use an image hosting service to post pics. I use Photobucket but there's others like Picassa. They are free.

Alana rust as in the fungus that attacks foliage, not rust on the metal hoops. Will my green tree frogs hibernate over the winter? There must be hundreds and they are just so cute. They eat a lot of the little bugs. Unfortunately I think they are also eating quite a few of my early instar caterpillars but that's life.

Here is a link that might be useful: rust on ornamentals

Ha ha ha ha ha! I have never had rust on an Ipomoea so it never occurred to me that you were talking about the plants. How lucky I must be after all these years not to have had a problem. What a DA I can be! I was wondering what your hoop houses were made of that they were rusty and was wondering why I had not had that happen.
Yes, your tree frogs will hibernate, probably in leaf litter or fissures in limbs and rocks depending on what is available.

Karyn - thank you for that link on rusts. The mentioned specificity of a rust for its host plant(s) answered my question nicely. I'll have to work with uploading pics another time - time consuming on slow dial-up.

Poisondart - lol about confusing plants and metal. I'm sure somewhen in the past, a science fiction writer has imagined a time when a house could be grown with the planting of a seed, though.

karen

Actually I can understand the confusion. Until this summer I'd never seen rust on a MG. I was just worried that it would affect the seeds but the pods, buds and blooms are clean. It only seems to affect the foliage and boy do they look like crap now. Lanky, bare stems with blooms, no foliage. Kind of what happens to roses that get Black Spot which is why I stopped growing roses. I cleaned up all the dropped leaves but I'm sure the spores are in the soil. I'm just going to dispose of the soil instead of recycling it.

If the spores are just on the surface, then maybe disposing of the top 2" would do? Hopefully someone knowledgeable will chime in about that. Would also love to know how long the spores persist in the soil...?

karen