Hi I’m new here…can we ask questions about plant diseases?

Hello,

I overwintered some carrots and was very excited when they popped up the spring and equally disappointed when I pulled them up and discovered huge cankers and all sorts of weird disfiguration on the carrots.

Is the forum the kind of place we can post pictures and ask questions about plants that we find, whether they are in the natural world or propagated in our garden that apparently have some kind of disease?

And aren’t diseases, in fact, sometimes a form of life?

Thanks for your input!

Fungus

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Welcome to forum! There are quite a few projects on iNat that focus on plant diseases and might be a good place to share such observations for IDs. Some are specific to pathogen/parasite (e.g. fungi, insect damage), or certain places (e.g. Europe, North America), for example this one.

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If your question is something like “what is this disease on my carrots?”, that would best be addressed by posting your photos directly to iNaturalist. If your question is more like “do you have trouble with diseased carrots in your garden, and if so, how do you treat/prevent it?”, that would be ok on the forum, but would also be appropriate on iNaturalist – either on the observation or maybe on a journal post.

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Very much life most of the time. Unless it’s a virus then people will debate if it’s alive. Most plant pathogens I come across seem to be from insects, mites, or fungi. Sometimes a mixture where one’s the vector and the other’s the infection.
As mentioned, forum’s less for identification questions, more for general wildlife discussion, or discussion about features of the website.

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Plant diseases are very cool, although some are hard to identify without the help of a microscope.
If you have no idea what is causing it, you can put in an ID of just “life” with a comment in the description something like “This observation is for the disease, not the plant it’s on”. Adding the name of the species of plant it’s found on here is very helpful as well. Then you can go to the Observation Fields, and add the field for “Host” or “Host Plant ID”, and put the name of the host plant there - that makes it much easier to search for in the future.
This umbrella project gathers most of the plant pathogen projects together, you can look through them to see which might be best for adding your observations to:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/plant-diseases-umbrella-complete

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