Rain, Rain Go Away

 Rain, rain go away. Did we ever think we’d hear that in Idaho? University of Idaho Extension educator Wayne Jones hopes Idaho’s novice gardeners aren’t getting discouraged. “Ugly” weather is hindering heat-loving sweet corn, tomatoes, squash and peppers and leaving seed and seedlings disease-prone in cold, wet soils, says the Idaho Falls-based Jones. “If this is their first year of gardening, they’re having a baptism by fire.”

 (Jones) “It’s very unusual for us up here. We don’t get this much rain and this cold all the time. It just doesn’t happen.”

 Well it sure has this spring in Joneses Bonner County which is way North. In southeastern Idaho’s Franklin County, Jones’s colleague Stuart Parkinson says record rainfall and flooding—coupled with cold weather—are turning plants yellow. “The rain fills the soil profile and drives out the oxygen, and the plant can’t get the oxygen it needs.”

 In southwestern Idaho’s Canyon County, colleague Ariel Agenbroad is seeing physiological leafroll in tomatoes—an upward rolling of leaves that occurs when tomatoes sit in waterlogged soils. The plants “usually come out of it” unless anxious gardeners overreact, Agenbroad said. “They think their tomatoes are wilting, so they keep watering them.”

 The Treasure Valley’s warm, wet, windy weather has also been the “magic combination” for fireblight. It’s striking pears and is poised to spread to apples. “It’s too late to treat it with sprays, so it’s time to prune out the damage.”