How to Manage Kale With Leaves that are Yellowing and Thinning

Although kale plants are usually extremely healthy and rarely contract diseases in a home garden, sometimes they can suffer from infections.

Your best way to prevent this is to keep your plants healthy and grow them under the appropriate conditions, i.e., full sun and cool temperatures.

Covering your seedlings with floating row covers will keep out pests and keep water containing pathogens from splashing onto your kale plants.

However, there are times when your kale plants can come down with a disease. Several types of pathogens can cause the leaves of your kale plants to turn yellow and thin out.

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While factors such as nutritional deficiencies and fungal infections can produce these symptoms, yellowing leaves on kale are usually due to bacteria.

These bacterial diseases can be serious. They spread quickly and damage the leaves. Once your kale plants are infected, it may not be possible to stop the disease if conditions are favorable.

Therefore, your best bet for control is to prevent infection. Immediately remove any infected plant to try and prevent the bacteria from spreading to the rest of your crop.

In this guide we will describe these diseases and provide tips on how to prevent and manage these infections.

Several species of bacteria cause the leaves of kale to turn yellow, including two major bacterial pathogens. The two organisms are Pseudomonas syringae pv. maculicola (Psm) and Xanthomonas campestris pv. amoraciae (Xca).

The weather will affect which of these bacteria are plaguing your plants. For example, Psm