Hello! I live in Hayden, ID and have an extensive pollinator garden (I avoid pesticides as much as possible). This year I have noticed issues with my coneflowers not producing petals on many of the buds. After reading extensively on Aster yellow disease vs. Eriophyid mites, I am left more confused than ever. The last thing I want to do is start pulling what I think might be incurably diseased plants, when it was only a mite infestation. I'm hoping you would be able to tell from the pictures what exactly is going on. I also recently cut one of my plants down to the leaves and treated it with a combo of insecticidal soap, neem oil and baking powder. I did this in the evening to avoid sunburn and affecting pollinators. Today I noticed many of the leaves have black edging, giving it an almost scorched look. Should I not have treated the potential mites with that method?

Can you share the pictures?

Does anyone know if this could be asters yellow or mite infestation? Trying to decide if I should replace them in the spring

Well, I've never seen mite damage before, but it doesn't resemble asters yellow to me. I'm leaning toward mite damage (I had to google it for comparison).

Hi: don't know if you saw this reference.
https://bygl.osu.edu/node/881

Formerly had a lot of echinacea cultivars and then started to get ongoing problems with coneflower rosette mite. I assume the mite originally came into the garden from commercial greenhouse stock. Eventually found it easiest to just get rid of the echinacea in our perennial beds.


Above: there is no damage to the echinacea here, except for flowers/flower cones. I did, on one occasion, see aster yellows in an echinacea plant, but the whole plant was affected (actually had yellowish leaves, I think), not just deformed flowers. The specialized bacteria, which causes aster yellows, spreads through the vascular system of whole plants. It can also spread to some other types of plants. The coneflower mite is apparently just carried by the wind from cone to cone, coneflower plant to coneflower plant.

Hi Stacey,

"Does anyone know if this could be asters yellow or mite infestation?"

With leaf branches growing out of the flower blooms, that looks almost certainly like an Asters Yellow infestation. The mites transmit the disease, and they are the primary transmitter of Asters Yellow. If you didn't have the mites, the disease probably wouldn't spread. I had an Asters Yellow infestation in some zinnias once. It caused some very weird zinnias. I sent all my infected zinnias to the city dump.

ZM