Is it me or are pests and diseases getting worse.

From the early 70s I have grown fruit, vegetables and, in the early days, bedding plants. For the first 15 years I was growing enough to sell some of them. I don't remember having any particular trouble with pests and diseases. Last year I saw the first sign of blight ever and this year it even struck the tomatoes and slugs are absolutely everywhere

 

I think its the lack of proper cold winters. As a kid every winter had bad freezes with regular frost heave which i guess killed off plenty slugs ,pests and fungal disease.

Our last freeze was in 2010,since then it only gets a bit chilly for a couple of weeks.

 

Yes, WeTam I believe that you have hit the nail on the head. I am just old enough to remember the Winter of 1947 and I was in Cheltenham for the Winter of 1963. 2010 was chilly but nothing like those two Winters. It was always received wisdom that frosts could be expected from the beginning of September, but for the last 4 years the first one here has been the first week in Novermber. It looks as the though our first sub-zero temperature will probably be tomorrow night. I have recorded rainfall and max. and min. temperatures for the last 5 years.

 

Also things mutate and get harder to kill

 

Personally I think it has nothing to do with hard winters.
How do gardeners further South manage, if its just down to hard winters?

Hard winters dont only kill off the pests, they wreak havoc with the friendly insects that predate on the pests, and probably more so.

If you bear in mind the insecticides that were available back then, and I mean those used generally by farmer and gardener there was more choice.

Now days the amatuer has probably only one chemical to use, and if that doesn't work?
We dont get a kill, the pest then becomes more resistant.

As to fungal diseases like blight, I've grown toms since the 70s and never actually knew what blight was until the 90s.
And that was down, in my opinion, to one very wet summer, since then its been the scourge of my toms, until this year, very dry, so no sign.

 

We go down well below zero most of the winter and the ground is fozen solid down to at least 2 feet. We still get blight, bugs, etc

and always did.

 

So what it comes down to is - that's life, live with it. There are certainly less weapons in the armoury - Temik in the potato rows, coated seeds etc. I am not an organic gardener so I use agricultural glyphosate to keep weeds away from the edges of the plot and I use slug pellets very sparingly. I think it was Bill Sowerbutts who said that the best way of getting rid of slugs was to chuck a load of slug pellets in your neighbours garden.

 

Also with chemicals you have to do it properly first time around