Water: Garden Friend….and Foe? – Water, Relative Humidity, and Plant Diseases
We all know that water is essential for life and that we have to ensure our landscapes, gardens, and houseplants all have a sufficient supply of the stuff. Forget to water your garden during a hot, dry spell and it could mean disaster for your plants. But water can also create issues for plants, usually when it is in an overabundance – water helps spread and develop diseases on foliage and excess soil moisture can damage roots, creating opportunities for root rots and other diseases. How do you meet the water needs of the plant while also avoiding issues associated water? Understanding how water affects disease organisms will help, along with some tried and true Integrated Pest Management Strategies.
Water and Pathogenic Microbes
Both bacteria and fungi require water to grow and reproduce. Most do not have a mechanism to actively take up and manage water, so they uptake water mainly through osmosis. This means there must be some form of water present for those microbes that are actively growing and especially for processes like reproduction which use not only a lot of energy but might also be required to carry spores in order to spread.
Both pathogenic microbes and beneficial (or neutral) microbes require water to thrive. It is one side of what we refer to as the disease triangle. Water (along with temperature) are major components of the “favorable environment” side of the triangle, with the other sides being a plant capable of being infected and a population of pathogens capable of infecting. Those last two sides meaning you have to have a population of the pathogen big enough to initiate or sustain an infection and a plant that can actually be infected by that pathogen.
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