 One of the challenges of growing a garden is dealing with diseases. Formation of disease is a combination of the right environment, the right disease organism, and the right host, all coming together in the perfect way. And it happens all the time as gardeners know. This year we're having a really good powdery mildew formation because the weather has been rather warm and dry this summer. And that is what really helps that organism grow on the flowers. So if you look at this nice display of zinnias, and if you look closer, you'll see the white, almost sugary-like substance on the leaves and in some cases the flowers. And that is powdery mildew. Now it's really not killing the plants at this point. It's just kind of just figuring them a bit. There are some control and prevention methods that we can do for powdery mildew. Once the disease is there though, it's there and you can't get rid of it. You just have to kind of deal with it. One good way to prevent it is to maybe not have your plants this close together. They tended, they grew really well this year. So they got tightly packed. You don't get good air circulation. And that helps promote the powdery mildew. Watering your plants from the bottom instead of from the top will also help decrease the disease and we do have drip irrigation in the beds here. That probably wasn't as much of a factor for these plants as it could be for other gardens. And zinnias just tend to be a little bit more susceptible to powdery mildew, although the newer cultivars, they tout resistance to the powdery mildew, but it's not totally eradicated. You will every once in a while get, you know, an outbreak like this. Now with perennials, if you do get powdery mildew on your plants, you wanna make sure you clean up your debris in the fall and with the annuals as well, you wanna make sure you get all these plants out into the dumpster and into the landfill so that they don't serve as a source of inoculum for later crops. Okay, another disease problem that we're seeing this summer and that actually I see every summer is something called aster yellows. Typically it's worse on French marigolds like we see here. And you can see it starting on this plant with the purple edges, the malformed leaves. And this plant as well, you can see it starting to affect that plant as well. It also will affect petunias and vincas quite bad as well. Now I don't really have a lot of good examples because as soon as you start seeing this, you wanna get rid of this plant and again, don't put it in your compost pile because it can serve as a source of infection. You wanna put it in your garbage and let it go out to the landfill. So again, you wanna remove these infected plants, just pull them out of the ground, get them into the garbage and away from your garden. Now it's really hard to prevent this type of disease. It's spread by leaf hoppers, which come up every summer and they come up at different times. Sometimes they're not as bad as other years. And you can try to control the leaf hoppers with insecticides, but the best way to control it again is just roguing out or removing the infected plants, getting them out of your garden and they won't serve as an inoculum for future plants. We are currently at the India Sioux Horticulture Demonstration Gardens, which is an official All America Selections display garden. So we have not only the All America Selections winners on display, but we have hundreds of other annual flowers that are here for people to look at whenever they feel like looking at the flowers. All America Selections, whenever you see that symbol by a flower or a vegetable in a catalog, typically means it's grown well in test sites all across the United States for a number of years. We had some exceptions that have not done as well here, but that's the benefit of having the flowers here for you to come out and see. You can see if they do well or not. So as you look through your seed catalogs this winter, remember to look for that red, white and blue All America Selections symbol and you should be assured of a quality flower or vegetable for your gardens next year. You'll recall that we had these verbena planted back in June and how sparse the planting looked, but through a combination of watering with our drip irrigation system that you can see here laid out at the head of the bed and good fertilization and good weed control and plenty of hot temperatures that we had this past summer. We've got an excellent stand of beautiful verbena that makes a beautiful ground cover and a fantastic show. One of my favorite plants to grow in an annual garden is this fountain grass, a penicetum, and it draws a lot of attention in our variety trials. We always plan it to kind of divide up our flower beds, but it makes a nice temporary screen during the summer months. It grows on, it loves the heat, give it a little bit of moisture and it'll get to be about four to five feet in height. And then in the fall of the year after a couple of good frosts hit it, you can go ahead and harvest these plumes and they make excellent dried flower arrangements. The plant has to be started from seed early on in the greenhouse, so the growers that go ahead and produce this will be starting it back in late January or early February so that you can buy these. Retail probably about four to six inches in height, but they take off all summer and look fantastic right through the summer, right up until a good hard killing frost takes them out. Beautiful, beautiful plants. Just sway nicely with the wind, very attractive, provide movement to the flower bed, to the landscape, and you can change them every year. You can see here, with this beautiful splash of color of our petunias, these hot pink and purple and rose colored and white petunias that we've got, how dense they've gotten over the growing season and literally choked out any weeds. You can just imagine these in your own garden through a little bit of tender loving care that they would be getting during that time period. We have before you a beautiful display of zinnias in full bloom this summer. They just took off and totally enjoyed the hot temperatures that we had, and of course we were able to supply them with a consistent supply of water through our drip irrigation system which kept the water off the foliage so we didn't have any disease development here, and Barb kept the weeds down when it was needed, but you can see that the canopy is so dense that virtually no weeds have any chance to come on at all, and if you keep these deadheaded during the season as the flowers get spent like this one right here, we can go ahead and take that one off, discard it, and then we can look forward to other flowers coming up and starting to go ahead and open up for us later on for the remainder of this growing season. These will look great right up until a killing frost takes them out and then you just rip them out and start all over again. Plan for some zinnias in your full sunshine bed for beautiful flowers next year.