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Gourd Zone, WA

I guess they can power through mosaic.
It looks bad but maybe it doesn't necessarily kill the whole plant or the pumpkin.

8/25/2024 2:47:16 PM

Germany

Sure, it doesn´t kill the plant :) As long as the mosaic infection happened a while after pollination (so that the plant has set a fruit and finalized its cell division and fruit growth won´t be disturbed by the virus), then it will just "disturb" the new plant growth. In my experience, the new growth (the disturbed new growth) is then more sensitive toward sunscald and toward infection by various fungal diseases, so I guess the quality of this tissue isn´t as good as it could be. Also, the productivity in photosynthesis most likely isn´t as good as it could be (because of the somewhat funny distribution of chlorophyll in the leaves). The problematic thing is that you cannot fill the patch with more of the healthy green stuff, so you have to stick with the productivity of what is there at the point of infection and try to keep those old but good leaves as healthy as possible for as long as possible. I´m sure there are many plants out there that have had a mosaic infection, and one simply didn´t see it because it happened somewhen in August when the patch was already filled with big healthy green leaves and the vines were then terminated (so no points for the effect of the mosaic to show up).

8/26/2024 5:58:47 AM