 Planning the Garden Variety Selection for Disease Resistance Disease resistance. This is really important in the success that you're going to have in your garden. When you're looking for a plant that has disease resistance, you'll be looking for a hybrid as they are bred for certain resistant qualities. Resistance to leaf and soul-borne diseases as well as nematodes is readily available in many varieties in the garden centers. Resistance is an important consideration where problems are known to exist or where proper preventative measures may not have been taken. So each year you want to be sure in your garden you remove plants once they finish production so they don't stay in that area and harbor insect and disease problems. Make sure you mulch your garden, drip irrigation. There are many things to consider to help reduce disease incidence, but in places where you know you've had problems growing vegetables in the past, especially tomato plants, squash or many of your cucurbits, there are many different disease resistant varieties available. And that will really give you a jump start in the success that you're going to have in your garden when they already have resistance bred into that plant for many of the problems that are commonly occurring in your garden. Disease resistance in Alabama, there are many popular crops associated with disease resistance that have catalog abbreviations. This is just showing you where tomatoes, for example, you'll see different letters and numbers associated with different viruses, wilts, even root not nematode. That will have resistance to those problems. Squash and cucumbers, for instance, common problems are powdery mildew, downy mildew, and thraknos, and also virus diseases. So look for these letters as well as other letters. The more letters, that means the more resistance that plant has to different strands of viruses and diseases or root not nematodes. Below I've included a link that will take you to even more information on many different wilts virus diseases that you can include if you know of the exact problem that you're having in your garden, you can look for a resistant variety if one exists. Here are some helpful links. The Alabama vegetable gardener, fall vegetable gardening, garlic, lettuce, vegetable garden crop information, backyard tomatoes, these are all just helpful links that we have on the ASIS website. aces.edu has many different publications with great information available. Check out our free garden apps as well. The one on the left is the sow app and the one on the right is the farming basics. Both are free from Alabama Cooperative Extension and you can find them on your smart device in the app store. There's variety information along with disease resistance as well as common insect and disease problems that affect those crops that can be found in the app that will give you also solutions for spraying and controlling this disease issues. And if you have further questions call our master gardener helpline 1-877-252-4769 or remember 1-877-ALLA-GROW.