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Ever look at your hostas
in late spring or early summer and see that they have a
bunch of splits in the leaves? Well, don't reach for the
insecticide or fungicide, these splits are usually
caused by frost damage. (Later in the summer, you might
see this damage after a hale storm.)
In the spring as the
hostas emerge from the soil that leaves are tightly
wound up in a "bullet". If we get a frost at night, it
may get cold enough to kill some of the cells in the
leaves on the outside. When the leaf fully unrolls and
opens up, the places where the cells were killed will be
weak. With the tension of the open leaf, they will split
causing a tear.
If you can lightly
squeeze the two sides of the split together and they fit
like a jigsaw puzzle, the damage is something physical
and the most common types of this injury are frost or
hale damage. The plants will look ragged but will
be o.k. and will replace the leaves with new ones next
year. |
