I am so annoyed. Last year I spotted Asters Yellow on Echinacea on my walk and I was like... oh, shit. That's what it looks like in person. I had one weird flower head on my Echinacea every year since I planted it and I'm one hundred percent positive that the plugs I bought were infested from the start three years ago. In the pictures I'm sharing below, you can see the odd green growth coming out of the seed head. That's not normal.
So on my list of things to do this week is dig out every single echinacea from my yard and get those out so the Asters Yellow doesn't infect anything else. Even Master Gardeners can have pest problems and disease infestation!
Asters Yellow can be devastating - this isn't something were you just pull off the seedheads or cut to the ground or use chemicals. The whole entire plant needs to be removed to remediate the situation. So for me, I have 4 echinacea plants that will need to come out. It can be extremely frustrating. For me though, as much as I've always wanted to grow echinacea, the rabbits have always chewed every single one of my plants to ground. Every year I have had to battle rabbits to keep this and quite honestly, I'm ok giving up this battle. It's frustrating every year to lose plants to the bunnies and so this will take a garden chore off my list in the spring.
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