Learn what's wrong with your crop and how to make it stop!

Respond to plant disease in your vegetable garden with a remote diagnosis and a fully custom action plan that applies Integrated Pest Management concepts to your unique growing space; A step-by-step roadmap with instructions on exactly how to deploy reliable, cheap, and chemical-free modifications to your garden and gardening for quick plant disease control and sustainable, long-term plant protection. Higher yield, better quality, and more fun are waiting for you in the garden. Start your consultation today!

Start a Consultation

Sweet corn grows on a vacant urban lot Nathan Wilson Gross 2026 — Fig. 1 - Sweet corn grows on a vacant urban lot

Expert assessment and consultation

Our Service

Garden Pathology uses photos and your answers to specific questions to provide useful plant disease diagnostic evaluations. Finding out what's wrong with your plants is the starting point for controlling the problem, and it should be the starting point for lasting, low maintenance, and environmentally safe defense against future plant diseases. The practical, step-by-step plan is sent to your email and is designed for all gardeners who want detailed, personalized, and actionable answers from human experts without the need, or time, it takes to mail samples and wait for traditional lab results.

Remote Consultation

Remote Plant Diagnosis

Clear photos and a description of what you're seeing is often enough for an experienced diagnostician. With a turnaround time of usually two business days, you'll receive a diagnosis and a practical plan without collecting or mailing plant samples.

Written diagnosis & care plan, sent by email
Results usually within 2 business days
Ideal for symptoms that show clearly in a photo, like leaf spots, stem cankers, or fuzzy, rotten roots
Control acute plant disease issues and manage long-term plant protection for your whole garden

Response — 2 business days

$65.00$49.00 Founding rate through 31 December 2026

Start a Consultation

How It Works

You tell us; we tell you

01

Tell us what you found and show us what it looks like.

Start your consultation — the intake form opens as soon as your payment goes through. There you describe what you are seeing and attach a set of plant and garden photos from standardized perspectives. Lots of clues and clear evidence improve the confidence level of our determinations, so try to give detailed responses and submit high-resolution, but unedited, images.

02

A human plant pathologist determines the problem and plans solutions

We might ask some clarifying follow-up questions, then we examine your photos and details you provide, along with your local weather, historic pathogen distribution, and other epidemiological data to determine the most likely cause of your garden-health issue. Next, we check out your garden. We look at where it is, what you grow in it, and how you grow it, to identify factors that may have contributed to your current problem, and to find easy ways to fix those immediate issues, while reducing the risk of future plant disease outbreaks.

03

We send you a diagnosis and plant disease management plan

We email you an organized, readable report with a diagnosis that describes the cause and severity of the issue, and includes helpful information about the disease cycle your plants are stuck in and the pathogen that's causing it. Your management plan will include a pragmatic short- and long-term outlook for that particular crop in its current space. Then we provide an instruction manual for plant protection in YOUR garden. Presented as a set of tasks, each with clear, step-by-step instructions on exactly how to apply established IPM practices to your specific garden setting. Each task is prioritized and designed to be short and self-contained, letting you tackle them all at once, or break them into manageable chunks, for when you're short on time or attention span.

About the Practice

Clear answers for gardeners

Garden Pathology offers remote plant disease diagnosis and management support to residential, community, and other small-scale, non-commercial food-crop gardeners. We want you to grow healthier plants and a more productive garden, without unnecessary spending. Garden Pathology does not sell gardening products or recurring services — every recommendation is diagnosis-driven and research-backed, with our goal being sustainable benefits for you, not future sales for us.

Case Intake

Start Your Consultation

The founding rate is $49 for the diagnosis and consultation package, reduced from the $65 list price for cases opened on or before 31 December 2026. An intake form opens upon payment, and that is where you describe the problem in as much detail as you like. The questions are open-ended, so be as thorough as you care to be. For help describing what you are seeing, check out the glossary and the plant anatomy guide. If anything is unclear from your answers, we will follow up by email, so keep an eye on your inbox.

What the consultation includes: a written diagnosis of the condition affecting the crop, plus a prioritized management plan of straightforward tasks drawn from established IPM practices. Delivery is usually within two business days.

Follow-up is included for fourteen days. A case remains open for fourteen days from delivery of the diagnosis. Follow-up questions concerning that diagnosis are answered at no additional charge during that period. A question concerning a different plant, or a new problem, opens a new consultation.

If a diagnosis is not possible, the payment is not kept. Where the submitted photographs and description cannot support a determination, a second submission with new photographs is accepted at no charge, or the payment is refunded in full — whichever the client prefers. Some cases require laboratory analysis. Garden Pathology does not guess, and will instead provide a list of trusted plant diagnostic labs in the client's region.

Start a Consultation — $49

Resources

Glossary — common plant pathology terms

Lesion: A localized area of diseased tissue (e.g., a spot or blotch).
Necrosis: Tissue death, often brown or black and dry.
Chlorosis: Yellowing of leaves caused by loss or insufficient chlorophyll.
Halo: A lighter ring around a lesion, often indicating toxin or pathogen spread.
Sporulation: Visible production of spores (often a powdery, fuzzy, or dusty appearance).
Canker: A sunken, often discolored lesion on stems or branches.
Blight: Rapid, widespread death of plant tissue (e.g., whole leaves or shoots).
Wilt: Drooping caused by loss of turgor or disrupted water transport.
Damping-off: Seedling collapse and rot, commonly caused by soilborne pathogens.
Systemic: When a pathogen or symptom affects the whole plant rather than a single spot.

Plant anatomy — terms to help describe symptoms

Leaf blade: The broad, flat part of the leaf where most photosynthesis occurs.
Petiole: The stalk that connects the leaf blade to the stem.
Node: The point on the stem where leaves or branches attach.
Internode: The stem segment between two nodes.
Crown: The plant part at soil level where stem and roots meet.
Root collar: The upper root area nearest the crown; often where rot or girdling shows.
Stem: Main structural axis that supports leaves, flowers, and fruit.
Flower / fruit: Reproductive structures; note whether symptoms affect these separately from leaves.