The onset of plant disease is one of the most puzzling events that can occur in your garden Plant. How did it take place? Will it grow more? Will every plant I have to die? How do I remove it? The health triangle is a concept that is important to understanding disease prevention (see drawing, right). Three events must occur simultaneously for the disease to occur.
You have a plant that can get sick (the host), a pathogen that can infect the plant (like a fungus, bacteria, or virus), and environmental factors (such as humidity or drought) that encourage the sickness. Cancer cannot exist without any of those factors, so removing even one of them is important for prevention.
The best protection against disease is a good offense, so consider this before you wait for a problem to develop in your garden.
Here are some tips for keeping your plants healthy and removing at least one-half of the disease triangle.
1. Examine plants carefully before purchasing
Avoiding the introduction of disease at its source is the best strategy to reduce its impact on your garden. No one wants the added benefit of getting a disease from a new plant. Understanding what a healthy plant must look like is one of the hardest things to learn, making it more challenging to determine whether the plant you want is sick.
