Detect, treat & prevent: Rust

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Do you have coppery orange spots on your plant’s leaves? It is probably rust! Find out here how to identify it, treat it and prevent it from happening again.

What is rust?

Rust is one of the most common plant diseases. This fungus mostly appears in spring and fall and spreads quickly. It is important to act as soon as you notice the first signs of it so that the fungi do not further damage your plant. It is very common on roses, citrus trees but can affect many types of plants, fruits, and flowers. This disease affects the photosynthesis process of the plants, weakens it, and overall, prevents it from growing properly.

How to identify rust?

Rust is easily identifiable. It creates orange spots all over the leaves of the plant. Although spots are usually orange, they can also be red, yellow, brown, or black depending on the type of fungus. The infection usually starts on the leaves but can also be found on the stems.

How to treat rust?

Treating rust is not different from treating any other fungus.

The first step is to remove all infected leaves and stems or other infected parts (burn them to make sure they don’t infect anything else present in your garden)

After removing all the infected leaves, spray a fungicide (labelled for that matter) to help prevent from another infection.

How to prevent rust?

Using preventive methods is crucial as when dealing with fungus, preventing is easier than treating.

Rust develops in humidity so when watering your plants, avoid watering the leaves, only water the foot of the plant. It is also good to thin out foliage so that humidity isn’t trapped in the leaves.

To make sure diseases such as rust don’t spread between plants make sure to place them far enough from each other as fungi are known to be skilled at spreading from one plant to another.

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