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[Fast Driver]

So I have a few eggplant growing and one of them is showing strange  markings. Yellow blotches are appearing. Is this a fungus? We’ve been having heavy rain and I mulch a lot so anything underground is really working overtime these days.

A few pics to illustrate:

[Growing.with.love]

Hi Fast Driver, that sure looks like a mealybug on the underside there. But what is causing your yellowing is probably a virus, not a fungus. The patterns are very telling: spots appear that aren’t interconnected and sometimes one half of the leaf is yellow but not the other. This is the sign of a mosaic virus.

Sadly the most common recommendation is to plant “virus-resistant” varieties. So either rip your crop out and replace it with another resistant variety, or let them survive through the disease and if any survive, keep seeds from those since they’ll be more resistant, normally.

Also check that you control against aphids and mealybugs like you have: they spread the virus as they travel around.

Sometimes the seeds themselves were contaminated, some websites say to soak the seeds in bleach (diluted) but I’m not so sure how that works.

[Author]

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