It's possible it could be fungus. If you see dark spots on the leaves
that's a tell-tale sign.

I spray all my plants once per week, one week with Sevin insecticide,
then the next week with Ortho Garden Disease Control.

The Ortho Garden Disease Control used to be called Daconil, for some
reason they changed the name. The active ingredient is Chlorothalonil,
just make sure it contains that.

Sevin has always been Sevin. It contains Carbaryl which kills more
bugs, mainly the leave boring ones that the Ortho chemicals don't. It
also is quite harmless to most birds and mammals in small quantities,
although I'd still wear a respirator and gloves when applying a lot of
it. It *will* kill fish so if you have a pond nearby with fish in it,
cover it with something like plastic paint-dropcloth.



oway (Tyra Trevellyn) wrote:

Does this sound familiar?........
Sunflower leaves (plants aren't yet blooming) are being eaten by something that
is NOT: slugs/snails, rabbits, birds, groundhogs, leaf-cutter bees. Large
irregular pieces missing from the outer margins of the leaves (some leaves are
almost gone by now). There is nothing resembling teeth marks or
chewed-off/pecked-off bits, and I don't believe it's a warm-blooded muncher at
all. The only other detail that looks a bit odd is that on a few of the leaves
I notice dime-sized dark spots that seem wet or oily.....just one per leaf on
the leaves that have them....but this could be something else entirely. This
all started a day or two ago, and the damage is progressing very fast to
defoliation, I fear. I see absolutely nothing munching the leaves during the
day.

So, does this sound like grasshopper damage? I've seen only one in my yard
this summer and normally this area is fairly free of major grasshopper
populations. But this is the wild and weird Northeast this year....

Any ideas?
Thanks and best,
Tyra
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