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| Photo Credit: Lee Ivy |
| Your local Cooperative Extension office can help identify what’s attacking your beloved plants – and offer advice on how to control it. |
If you don’t know it already, your local Extension office is a vast gardening resource. In addition to doing soil tests and offering gardening programs (and so much more), your local Extension agents are experts at answering questions! Got a plant problem? Hit up the experts at your local office – just be sure to bring in a plant or pest sample. If you follow these five guidelines to getting a good sample, you’ll be practically guaranteed a successful diagnosis!
1. Bring a plant sample to the office. Although your local Extension agents answer many plant-related questions over the phone each day, some requests simply can’t be performed without a face-to-plant meeting. Just like a doctor can’t diagnose your ailments over the phone, an Extension agent can’t always identify a plant or its troubles without taking a look at the specimen. So don’t be surprised if when you call for help, someone asks you to bring your plant (or a piece of it) to the office. 2. Bring a live sample. You’ll have a much better chance of getting a successful identification if you bring in a sample that contains both living and damaged tissue. Unfortunately, we often don’t notice our favorite plant is in danger until it’s almost completely gone. This makes identifying the plant’s killer that much more difficult. So I suggest scouting for pests and plant problems on a semi-regular basis, as most avid gardeners do. When you notice a plant with browning branches or strange symptoms, there’s still time to get the problem corrected before it’s too late. 3. Bring a fresh sample. Don’t leave your plant sample sitting around in your car all day before bringing it into your local Extension office. Wilting not only makes problems difficult to identify, it can mask or change a plant’s characteristics to make the problem look like something else. It’s best to cut plants in the morning and bring samples directly to the Extension office. (I recommend calling ahead or scheduling an appointment to ensure you’ll catch an expert in the office and that they’ll see the freshest sample possible.)
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