Hi everyone!
I'm not posting very often, because I don't really have any news about daylilies to share.
But I have a problem!
Some of my DLs are heavily "eaten" by something... I know there are snails, the very small ones and the blue slug pellets seem to have no effect at all, I don't know if it's beacause pellets are too big for them or what. They hide in the leaves, I captured many the past season but I see they are still in some plant. I also had a problem with a small weevil the past year, larvae were eating roots in some planths and the adults were eating leaves. Things went better after using a specific trap.
I can't recognize these signs, are they made by snails? Or what? Some leave is chewed off at a half of the length. I alse have diatomaceus earth but it rains every day so it is wasted...
Thank you in advance!

The middle picture looks like it could be partly spring sickness but I'm not sure about the spots that look more recently chewed. Have you been out at night with a flashlight to look for possible culprits?

My goodness, Sabrina. That's gotta be an awfully big slug! I wouldn't go out there in the dark!

sooby said:The middle picture looks like it could be partly spring sickness but I'm not sure about the spots that look more recently chewed. Have you been out at night with a flashlight to look for possible culprits?

Hi Sue!
I don't know about spring sickness, sure the plant has some distortion, but since the past year I discovered that this little weevil could damage roots and the final damage could look like spring sickness... I am not sure about what I'm seeing. Using the apposite pesticide the past year in short time helped to have nice DLs with signs of apparent spring sickness gone in few days. If it doesn't rain I will go out and check, the problem is the continuos rain. It's good for DLs because in ten days they grew like monsters, but it doesn't help in critters checking!

josieskid said:My goodness, Sabrina. That's gotta be an awfully big slug! I wouldn't go out there in the dark!

Nice one!!! I will ask husband to come with me and be ready with a baseball bat!!!

cybersix said:
Using the apposite pesticide the past year in short time helped to have nice DLs with signs of apparent spring sickness gone in few days.

Hi Sabrina,
Which pesticide do you use against spring sickness?

@Ronny07, sorry I may be wrote in a wrong way (I'm italian), I will try to explain better.
I discovered that weevil larvae feed on roots, and the plant grows stunt and weak, so when I started to see adults flying and leaves eaten in their typical manner I though of using a pesticide for them, and one plant recovered well.
So what I thought was spring sickness the past year could have been a weevil larvae infestation, but I'm not sure it's so for every plant showing signs of spring sickness.
I can put the link for the pesticide but it's in italian: https://www.ebay.it/i/28282127....

Thsi small weevil can be a real problem. Larvae eat roots (they can kill a plant) and the adults eat leaves on the borders, so the signs are pretty clear, here are two pictures to show what I'm talking about.
Hope it's more clear now!

Ronny07 said:
Hi Sabrina,
Which pesticide do you use against spring sickness?

The pesticide appears to be chlorpyrifos? Quoting from an article about chlorpyrifos: "Most home use of the product was banned in the US in 2001, and the UK banned almost all uses in 2016."

From: https://www.chemistryworld.com...

FWIW before it was banned here in Ontario for homeowner use I tested it for spring sickness and it didn't appear to have any effect.

@sooby, yes, it's chlorpyrifos. At 1% I believe, it's on sale in common garden centers.

I think some plants were affected by weevil and not spring sickness that's why it worked, I was confusing symptoms until I read about weevil.

Sabrina,

Read the article on the link below, scientists claim that a fungus, Botrytis deweyae, is the cause of spring sickness ....



https://journals.plos.org/plos...

Ronny07 said:Sabrina,

Read the article on the link below, scientists claim that a fungus, Botrytis deweyae, is the cause of spring sickness ....

Note, though, that they were not actually able to reproduce spring sickness with the fungus, the plants died instead. There was a study quite a few years ago that actually did experimentally reproduce something like spring sickness with the daylily leaf streak fungus, Aureobasidium microstictum. Bulb mites have also been suspected and there is likely more than one contributing factor to this malady. See the references at the bottom of this page:

http://web.ncf.ca/ah748/2002.h...

They don't exactly claim that Botrytis deweyae is the cause of spring sickness.

"The cause(s) of this disease remain obscure. "

"Based on this data, we infer that this new species, described here as B. deweyae, is likely to be an important contributor to the development of 'spring sickness' symptoms. "

"The emergence of this disease is suggested to have been triggered by breeding-related changes in cultivated hybrids, particularly the erosion of genetic diversity."
I did appreciate the link, it shows they are making progress and have not given up on looking for the exact cause(s).
Edited:
Sorry, crossed posted with sooby.

"The emergence of this disease is suggested to have been triggered by breeding-related changes in cultivated hybrids, particularly the erosion of genetic diversity."

People have actually been saying the same thing for decades Spring sickness has been known since at least the 1950s and something that sounds like it but without the name was also described in the 1940s (contrary to the article's statement that it was first reported in the 1970s) so it's hardly anything new, plus species daylilies can get it.

Thanks everyone for your informations on this.
I never saw a spring sickness this bad, if it's really spring sickness. I noticed the signs of the pictures I posted on many plants, in the inner leaves, seedlings seem to be affected too.
The plant of the pictures has two fans completely twisted from the ground.

I don't know if I should cut all the leaves or not. There are many tiny snails around but at this point I don't know what is really causing all this!

Earwigs invasion has started too!

Sabrina, if you can post a few pictures of other affected plants we may have a better idea if it could be spring sickness.

Edited to add: "I think some plants were affected by weevil and not spring sickness that's why it worked, I was confusing symptoms until I read about weevil."

Daylilies typically grow out of spring sickness by themselves with no treatment, so if you apply a treatment at the time you see the damage (which is long after the damage actually started) it can appear that the treatment worked but the plant would have recovered anyway without it.

To answer the question about cutting leaves, as long as leaves are green and alive they are feeding the plant by photosynthesis. Gardening is frequently a trade-off, however, so you won't kill the plant by cutting off affected leaves to make it look better, but it would be to please you rather than the plant.

@sooby, here are pictures from other plants. I wrote some notes on some.
Thank you!















Edited to add: blue pellets are for snails, red pellets for earwigs, ants and weevil. I forgot to add a note, there's one picture in which you can see a fan completely bent to the left, and two snails appears on a particularly damaged leaf.

Adding pictures of the leaves I found on the ground, eaten maybe?

Some of it could be spring sickness, some could be a nutrient deficiency (do you know your soil pH?) and some I'm not sure. Are both the blue and pink pellets for the snails or is one something else?

sooby said:Some of it could be spring sickness, some could be a nutrient deficiency (do you know your soil pH?) and some I'm not sure. Are both the blue and pink pellets for the snails or is one something else?

The pink/red pellets are for earwigs, weevil and ants.

Three weeks ago I spread a granular, low release fertilizer.
I see some leaf could indicate a deficiency, probably iron.
The soil is heavy clay in some spot, in other spots are raised beds with bagged soil.
It rained for two week and we're expecting more rain, I could see the new growth on almost all plants more dark green so I think rain helped. We have this clay soil and calcareous tap water so it doesn't help when I water the garden. Last time I checked PH was between 7 and 8.
It's a difficult soil but the problem is almost everywhere, even in the seedlings bed.