Smut fungi

[saliha]

I have had at this year some sort of smut fungi on my lovages. I noticed it at the first time at early June and took away badly infected leaves but it didn´t help much. Later I decided to cut all stems down.

It makes this kind of brown spots to the stems:



When touch them, very fine dust-like spores spread. Similar spots spread also to the leaves, they become yellow and die.



There are about 1500 different varieties of smut fungis but as I wasn´t sure, if this one can infect also other plants, I prefered to cut it down. That much still left as the youngest leaves looked health.



Now need to watch if also other plants will get any brown spots or not. Lovage has been at the same place many years now so maybe I need to plant new one to the other part of garden at the next year.

[Riz]

thanks for this , i have never had to deal with this fungi !!

it only affected the lovage?

[saliha]

I haven´t noticed it with other plants. It seems that there is own variety for plants like special smut fungi for corn, wheat, roses, anemones etc. But I continue to keep watching in the garden.

For the larger scale agriculture, different type of smuts are the most serious threat to cereal grain crops.