Common Mistruth! The real truth, marigolds DO NOT repel insects, they
just attract them and not to your tomatoes. Marigolds are one of the
biggest bug and disease magnets in the garden. They are also very finicky
about the soil pH, they prefer it being fairly high. We apply liquid
limestone when they start to show the bronze leaf effect from to low of a
pH.

Also for the white marigolds. The seed breeders had a difficult time
getting this one and actually Burpee had a contest to see if someone could
breed one several years ago. I think that the first one to come out was
Snowball or something like that and it was breed in someone's backyard. So
vigor and growth were not a fact in breeding the white marigold, only color
was important. Now that they have the color they can start tiring to
improve the plant. Try it again in a few years!

Davy

"tmtresh" wrote in message
m...
Last year, when I planted my tomatoes, I planted marigolds around
them. I was told that marigolds repelled some of the nastier
insects/bugs/creepy crawlies from the tomatoes. Well, my tomatoes did
ok in my poor soil (just moved in, didn't enrich the soil). Within a
couple weeks of planting, the marigolds were stripped of all their
leaves by something and were dead. I thought it was rather ironic that
the marigolds had problems where the tomatoes (although they were
undersized from the poor soil) survived. I didn't plant any marigolds
this year.

"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
. net...
"Boris Nogoodnik" wrote in message
et...
Year after year I am having probem with Marigolds. It's well
prepared flowerbed with compost and perlight and everything else
glows fine, but the Marigolds. They just dying couple of weeks
after I plant them. It's in partial shade. Location is New
Jersey. Do they need something specific? And are there any
known conditions that they cannot tolerate, while other plants
can?


That's strange. Here in upstate NY (Rochester), when all the other
plants
are suffering from drought or floods or high winds, my marigolds are the
ruffians who laugh it all off.

1) Whenever I've read about marigold culture, sources say the plants
need
nothing special, and in fact may do better with less feeding. I grow
them in
the nastiest soil on my property, and they're robust, year after year.
Primarily, I grow the "climax" series from Burpee, which are the big
marigold plants, not the little French/dwarf varieties. There have been
other odd marigold problems in this newsgroup recently, and I wonder if
the
out-of-control breeders have managed to lose some of the marigold
family's
bulletproof characteristics.

2) The meaning of "partial shade" varies from one yard to the next, so
it's
hard to know the real situation. Some of my marigolds grow on the West
side
of the house, and see no sun until mid-afternoon, at which point they
are
roasted until sundown. They seem identical in quality to the ones which
get
sun all day. If your version of "partial shade" means dappled sunlight
most
of the time and full sun hardly ever, you should see lesser results, but
certainly not plant death.

3) You say you've had the same problem year after year. Are you growing
the
same (named) variety each year? Or, same general category? If so, you
might
want to try a more robust variety. If you bought these as plants, I'd
contact the nursery and ask if they've had complaints about the variety.

-Doug